ill hold your tears if youd take my hand

☀️

[kiwichapstickss]

Back then i knew nothing, and now i know even less. i’m in need of good people.

————

Beauty is difficult to judge; i’m not ready yet. Beauty is a riddle.

————

A silly woman with a heart and no intelligence is just as unhappy as one with intelligence and no heart. That’s an old truth. I’m a silly human with a heart and no intelligence, and you’re a silly woman with intelligence and no heart; we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.

————

They call society savage and inhuman because it shamed a girl who’s been seduced. But if you call society inhuman, you must admit that the girl suffers at the hands of that society. And if she suffers at it’s hands, then how can you drag her into the newspapers in front of that society and demand that she should not suffer?

————

What is there for me in all this beauty, when at each minute, each second, i’m now compelled to be aware that even this tiny housefly buzzing around me in the sunbeam now, even it is a participant in all this feast and chorus, knows it’s place, loves it and is happy, while i alone am an outcast, and it’s only because of my cowardice that i’ve been unwilling to realize that before now!

————

To you I want to say everything, everything, even about the most important things, when i want to; for my part, and you must hide nothing from me. i want to talk about everything with at least one human being as i talk to myself.

————

Do not consider my words the sick rapture of a sick mind, but to me you are - perfect! I have seen you, I see you everyday. For i do not judge you; not through my reason did i arrive at the thought that you are perfection; i have simply come to believe it. But i am guilty of a sin before you: I love you. After all, one should not love perfection ; perfection should only be viewed as perfection, shouldn’t it?

————

It’s better to be unhappy and know, than to be happy and live . . . as a fool.

————

- The Idiot | Fyodor Dostoevsky

[kiwichapstickss]

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become a part of it. She had that feeling in school often, but it wasn’t accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look or feel like. All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn’t need to imagine it anymore.

————

Back home, Connell’s shyness never seemed like much of an obstacle to his social life, because everyone knew who he was already, and there was never any need to introduce himself or create impressions about his personality. If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone.

————

Marianne, he said, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

————

Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she’d participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship. In school she had believed herself to be above such frank exchanges of social capital, but her college life indicated that if anyone in school had actually been willing to speak to her, she would have behaved just as badly as anyone else. There is nothing superior about her at all.

————

Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he’s acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.

————

If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed. She wishes that she could have forgiven Rob, even if it meant nothing to him. When she thinks of him now it’s always with his face hidden, turning away, behind his locker door, behind the rolled-up window of his car. Who were you? she thinks, now that there’s no one left to answer the question.

————

So it’s over, and they’re just nothing? What would it even mean, to be nothing to her? He could avoid her, but as soon as he saw her again, even if they only glanced at one another outside a lecture hall, the glance could not contain nothing. He could never really want it to. He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.

- Normal People | Sally Rooney

[kiwichapstickss]

Her hands were to her face but she could see through the prison of her fingers, could see them, how they were, beautiful, wrapped in light, swathed in the bright, angelic robes of Acceptance.

————

She did not really want to see them as her classmates. She wanted them to be beautiful strangers.

————

- Carrie | Stephen King

[kiwichapstickss]

“If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.”

————

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that’s you’re free to do anything.”

————

“Getting fired,” Tyler says, “is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives.”

————

Marla’s philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn’t.

————

“If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?”

————

“What you have to consider,” he says, "is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.” How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than His indifference. If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention. Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing? Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.

————

What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a perfection he’d made himself. And a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

————

Valley of the Dogs. Where even if they don’t kill you, if someone loves you to take you home, they still castrate you.

————

That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

- Fight Club | Chuck Palahniuk

[kiwichapstickss]

“Most people are fitted with Lead Boots when they are just little kids and have to wear them all their lives. These Lead Boots are called CONSCIENCE. I have none, so I can soar high above the heads of the Normal Crowd.”

————

Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.

————

- Mr. Mercedes | Stephen King

[kiwichapstickss]

“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we match in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us.”

————

“To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then - how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.”

————

“Of course I was inexperienced, of course I was idiotic, shy and young. I knew all that. She did not have to tell me.”

————

“The eyes were not the eyes of the man I loved, the man I knew. They looked through me and beyond me, cold, expressionless, to some place of pain and torture I could not enter, to some private, inward hell I could not share.”

————

“It’s funny, I thought, how the routine of life goes on, whatever happens; we do the same things, go through the little performance of eating, sleeping, washing. No crisis can break through the crust of habit.”

- Rebecca | Daphne Du Maurier

[kiwichapstickss]

“I don’t need anyone to save me. All I ever ask is that you not abandon me.”

————

“Can you imagine what that’s like - to be seen only for the life you could make, not the life you already possess?”

————

“History may record the end of my line as a tragedy, but a house that crushes its own daughters beneath its foundations - that is no house at all. Better it burns with the rest. A different world must be drawn from the ashes.”

- A Day Of Fallen Night | Samantha Shannon

[kiwichapstickss]

If I’d worn glasses I could have passed for smart, but I was too impatient to be truly smart. You’d have expected me to enjoy the stillness of closed rooms, take comfort in dull silence, my gaze moving slowly across paper, walls, heavy curtains, thoughts never shifting from what my eyes identified—book, desk, tree, person. But I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.

————

“All I had to offer were my skills as a doormat, a blank wall, someone desperate enough to do anything—just short of murder, let’s say—simply to get someone to like me, let alone love me.”

————

“I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library—something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.”

- Eileen | Ottessa Moshfegh

[kiwichapstickss]

“When I was a child, my parents—and then, learning from their example, my siblings—loved to refer to me as “melodramatic,” or, worse, a “drama queen.” Both expressions confused and then rankled me. I felt things deeply, and often the profound unfairness of the world triggered a furious, poetic response from me, but while that was cute when I was a toddler, neither thing—feeling, responding to feeling—aged well. Ferocity did not become me. Later, retelling stories about this dynamic to my wife, my therapist, the occasional friend, filled me with incandescent rage. “Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these words—after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch.”

- In the Dream House | Carmen Maria Machado

[kiwichapstickss]

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

—Zora Neale Hurston

[kiwichapstickss]

“Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them? Especially moms. They’re the most romanticized of anyone.

Moms are saints. Angels by merely existing. NO ONE could possibly understand what it’s like to be a mom. Men will never understand. Women with no children will never understand. No one but moms know the hardship of motherhood, and we non-moms must heap nothing but praise upon moms because we lowly, pitiful non-moms are mere peasants compared to the goddesses we call mothers.”

- I'm Glad My Mom Died | Jennette McCurdy

[kiwichapstickss]

“But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than `the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to sui “suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of a progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, now, search your soul; lovie—is the vampire so bad?”

-

“The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!”

- I Am Legend | Richard Matheson

[kiwichapstickss]

zanyanomaly replied to your post “He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t...” op what's the name of this art piece I'm obsessed

Hey! Its called “Students” by the artist Sergei Nikolaevich Shilnikov!

[kiwichapstickss]

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

—

And although he hasn’t fretted over whether his life was worthwhile, he had always wondered why he, why so many others, went on living at all; it had been difficult to convince himself at times, and yet so many people, so many millions, billions of people, lived in misery he couldn’t fathom, with deprivations and illnesses that were obscene in their extremity. And yet on and on and on they went. So was the determination to keep living not a choice at all, but an evolutionary implementation? Was there something in the mind itself, a constellation of neurons as toughened and scarred as tendon, that prevented humans from doing what logic so often argued they should? And yet that instinct wasn’t infallible—he had overcome it once. But what had happened to it after? Had it weakened, or become more resilient? Was his life even his to choose to live any longer?

—

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

- A Little Life | Hanya Yanagihara

[kiwichapstickss]

It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn’t have the energy to try.

—

How could he tell Harold that he dreamed not of marriage, or children, but that he would someday have enough money to pay someone to take care of him if he needed it, someone who would be kind to him and allow him privacy and dignity?

—

He was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm’s money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, it’s hours, it’s days.

—

Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

- A Little Life | Hanya Yanagihara

[kiwichapstickss]

He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cares if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

- A Little Life | Hanya Yanagihara

[kiwichapstickss]

None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyways; they only wanted to tell their own.

—

They were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. And he had no money. He had nothing to give them, he had nothing to offer.

—

“You said to never just accept anything”

“Not in life. You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry—they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”

—

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

- A Little Life | Hanya Yanagihara