A dreamer's distractions

Dreamer. Awkward law student. Here lies sentences and stories I have loved, original writing on @thenigerianstoryteller

[wordsnquotes]

“Maybe I don’t like people as much as the rest of the world seems to… But occasionally, people will pleasantly surprise me and I’ll fall in love with them, so go figure.”

— Mark Oliver Everett, Things The Grandchildren Should Know (via thelovejournals)

[blindlyobsessed]

me in public

thinking: if you can read my thoughts then hello

[blindlyobsessed]

Studying for finals and I want to write. Can't wait for this to be over!

[blindlyobsessed]

I imagine her saying “that skank” where she is right now. I can picture her in her home, draped in pearls, perhaps in a poster bed like a princess, her marble floor glittering. I hear “skank” but I’m not disturbed by what it means. I’m thinking about how it feels to belong in this room, to lie there so much that you are no longer caught by its beauty. To waste your breath doing anything else but taking in it’s beauty.

- So the rich girl hates me.

[ablogwithaview]

What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.

Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Fragile Shelter,” In Other Words. (via a-witches-brew)

[lastnightsreading]

Phillip Lopate at the New School, 4/12/17

[mabylc]

me: not today, satan 

satan: you’ve been canceling our plans for weeks now. if it’s something i said, please just tell me

[ohmygodwaytoolong]

Bart: “Do you really need all these Kurt Vonnegut novels?” Lisa: “They self-reference each other!” –THE SIMPSONS, S23E10

[eyestothesun]

Walking into the law school like

[fortuneredding]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. And then the murders began.

[welovejamesspader]

This is my favorite scene.

[liquidlightandrunningtrees]

Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later — the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (via liquidlightandrunningtrees)

[wordsnquotes]

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, ‘What do you mean?’ You say, ‘Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?’ And he’ll look stunned and say, ‘How did you know? He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (via wordsnquotes)

[quotemadness]

You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them … And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.

David Foster Wallace (via quotemadness)

[larmoyante]

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

David Foster Wallace (via larmoyante)

[fawksianfella]

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is really freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (via fawksianfella)

[lifeinpoetry]

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.

Marie Howe, “Part of Eve’s Discussion,” The Good Thief (via lifeinpoetry)