Commonplace Book

I started collecting quotes in elementary school and I kept them all in a huge black binder. I kept it up for over twenty years and then I lost the binder. This will never be the same, but at least I can't lose it.

[petaltexturedskies]

Mary Oliver, from "At Blackwater Pond" in Twelve Moons

[weltenwellen]

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

[electronicbinder]

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing, until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.

~ Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

[omgthatdress]

"But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?" -- Ursula K. Leguin

[theotherkingdoms]

—Olivia Gatwood, “We All Got Burnt that Summer” from Life of the Party

[petaltexturedskies]

Eva Ibbotson, The Reluctant Heiress

[stavroginas]

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem; "On Keeping A Notebook"

[bakewake]

People have actually said to me, and rudely, “Don’t you wish you could have done this when you were 35?” This is the truth: I couldn’t have done it when I was 35. I didn’t know enough. I hadn’t experienced enough. Every artist has their own personal evolution. I’m a very slow bloomer.

— Helen Pashgian

[electronicbinder]

The drench seemed to come off the sea floor itself, where blind white fish ferried themselves by their own light through the great polar cold. I saw sharks’ teeth and whales’ earbones littered about down there like gravestones.

~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

[electronicbinder]

Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs. Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr. Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and ten.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.

~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

[electronicbinder]

Mornings are a promise, afternoons are a heartbreak. Evenings are sly, and they deliver you into the thin arms of each dark night. But mornings hold such possibility, the tangible weight of better: today will be different. When the evening comes (such dreadful hours), the promise of the day has been broken because nothing is different—you are still yourself. To return to that, every day, to return to the truth of who and where you are, is more than a person should have to bear.

~ A Good House for Children, Kate Collins

[electronicbinder]

What people needed of her and from her was specific and almost impersonal: the mothering and the housework and the stoic agreement to the terms of their life as dictated by Nick. At times, it felt as though she could be replaced by anyone, any other woman, and as long as children were fed and sheets were cleaned and tax returns were filed, her family might never notice, might never realize the facsimile in her place. As though her labor equals her love, and is replaceable.

~ A Good House for Children, Kate Collins

[electronicbinder]

She was glad of it now, glad to have spent a lifetime practicing the art of disappearing, of removing herself in such a way that those left behind almost never noticed, and only later wondered if perhaps they’d been abandoned.

~ A Good House for Children, Kate Collins

[electronicbinder]

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

[adampvrrish]

life really is just like. you meet people you love them and then you lose them and you never see them again. and it's inevitable and it happens to everyone and there's nothing you can do about it

[adampvrrish]

richard siken quote. you know the one

[veliseraptor]

excerpt from "Black Oaks" by Mary Oliver (originally printed in West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)

[huzzahitsthedoctor]

“In Jewish thought, a sin is not an offense against God, an act of disobedience. A sin is a missed opportunity to act humanly. The verb to sin in Hebrew is also used in the sense of ‘missing the target.’ When God created us free to choose between good and bad, He also gave us the capacity to know when we had chosen wrongly”

— Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking