Pesky Loves

Often when I'm reading, I have to write some of it down.

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Shame is the writer’s domain. When a writer looks at a blank page, she’s looking at her own shame.

-Sasha Steenson, from the essay “Pure Shame”

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“It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender.”

-Sophie Elmhurst, A Marriage at Sea

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What (Not) to Do When Your Toddler Gives You Lice

Warning: this article is a head scratcher

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“When someone insulted me, the Politeness and Nice Normal Girl programmes that I had to run every day in order to rub along with everyone overrode the other bit to the back of my brain that quietly said, That’s not okay. “

-Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

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“The curse, he explained, our shared curse, was this: we could not gracefully integrate our authentic selves with the stark facts of reality, and the inability to resolve this tension causes us to suffer and to make other people suffer.”

-Chloe Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty: a Memoir

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“This is not a ‘meet people’ bar. This is a trauma bar.”

-Seth Rogen, Platonic

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If I could not live except with tenderness, why was tenderness left out of my life?

-Fernando Pessoa

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I can hold a swimmer here

To the shore by a string

Hurry up we don’t have time

Avalanches in my mind

I’m getting buried in this dream

It’s just as soapy as it seems

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Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we’re following something—we don’t even know what it is but we follow it.

-Elizabeth Strout, from “Oh, William!”

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We go to the land of the dead all the time. We go in dreams.

-Elissa Washuta, “White Magic”

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I think [one’s] beauty. . . is fraudulent. Nothing to do with you.

-Lady Caroline Blackwood

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The whole world at your fingertips

The ocean at your door

…..

There it is again

That funny feeling

That funny feeling

…….

That unapparent summer air in early fall

The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all

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Everything groans under treachery.

-Elizabeth Hardwick, “Sleepless Nights”

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Before entering [my study], I take off my everyday work clothes, which are covered with mud and filth, and go through the ritual of donning my robes of state. Thus fitted out in appropriate dress, I enter the venerable courts of the ancients, where they kindly receive me.

-Machiavelli, 12/10/1513

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Freeze! Don’t move

You’ve been chosen

As an extra

In the movie adaptation

Of the sequel

To your life

Pavement “Shady Lane”

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The things we forget may as well have never happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice.

Isabel Allende, “Daughters of Fortune”

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The Answer

Will we speak to each other

making the grass bend as if

A wind were before us, will our

way be as graceful, as

substantial as the movement

of something moving so gently.

We break things in pieces like

walls we break ourselves into

hearing them fall just to hear it.

Robert Creeley