Commonplace Ponderings

Excerpts from various forms of writing that I find grand, wonderful, perplexing, and thought provoking. My WordPress Blog My GoodReads

[commonplace-ponderings]

I like you, though. You make me feel safe but also kind of nervous. It's a strange feeling. I think that you've rescued me. You're different.

Sui

Banana Yoshimoto, N.P.

[commonplace-ponderings]

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.”

Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

[commonplace-ponderings]

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. well, I hope that if you are out there you read this and know that yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.

Rebecca Katherine Martin

[commonplace-ponderings]

If you're an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologize for your shyness. Or at school you might have been prodded to come out of your shell-that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and some humans are just the same.

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

[commonplace-ponderings]

What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.

Patti Smith, Just Kids

[commonplace-ponderings]

In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.

Miranda July, It Chooses You

[barcarole]

I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea…

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

[commonplace-ponderings]

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

Henry Miller

[commonplace-ponderings]

The thoughts people have when they can’t get to sleep are generally a little weird. Your mind rambles through the dark, tossing up one dreamy conclusion after another, each one as tender as a bubble.

Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

[commonplace-ponderings]

Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

[commonplace-ponderings]

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning. Imagine seeing the grocery store’s checkout girl grow horns. Imagine growing younger instead of older. Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

[commonplace-ponderings]

He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren’t we all.

Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

[commonplace-ponderings]

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. … It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

[commonplace-ponderings]

Was drug induced happy still happy? Was it the right kind of happy? Did it count?

Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir

[commonplace-ponderings]

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

Charles Bukowski

[commonplace-ponderings]

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Charles Bukowski

[commonplace-ponderings]

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Leonardo da Vinci