Life's Like a Book of Short Stories

[tastefullyoffensive]

(via aJackieLarsen)

[greelin]

“that’s the spirit” i say as i gesture to the spirit that’s been haunting my home for years. when will they leave or start contributing to the household by doing something like helping with laundry. when will they pay rent

[poetsandwriters]

“‘And for me, while fiction is necessary, I prefer it to be timeless rather than timely. So when I write fiction, I am prepared to wait for it to come to me. I am never in a hurry.”

—Arundhati Roy, in Renee H. Shea’s feature “Worth the Wait” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2017)

[poetsandwriters]

“You destroy a little camp of mushrooms, / pull leaves into a pile, / are struck with wonder / when there rolls out / a little bird’s nest— / the garden’s / brain.”

—William Brewer, from “Debris”

[poetsandwriters]

“In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture….Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them…”

—Paul Kalanithi, from When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

[lifeinporcelain]

[schizofriendia-blog]

oh how the times have changed 

This is definitely worth reblogging.

always reblog these ads

[lifeslikeabookofshortstories]

     ***     

     A flicker of electricity

     erratic but growing

     A point pond of brine

     beneath an ocean

     Swelling from a deep core 

     of some evasive 

     Substance

     There’s nothing above

     Maybe a hint of a storm

     in the distance?

     The waters, not particularly

     fussed, sloshing lazily about

     But the brine seeps 

     like chill lava

     Cloying, smothering

     The heaviness at the bottom of 

     an Anxious heart

     ***

[historical-nonfiction]

…[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American ‘Labour Union’ in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).

Karl Marx, Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence 1844-1877 (via historical-nonfiction)

[d0llxb0nez]

[poetsandwriters]

Reconnecting to art and to writing helps me believe in the goodness of other people. When I prove to myself that I can be empathetic and interested, I become less isolated in the present and far less afraid of the future.

Stephanie Powell Watts in this week’s Writers Recommend (Poets & Writers, 2017)

[poetsandwriters]

All you have to do is walk into a bar and have somebody start telling you the story of their life to realize that everybody, to some degree, is an unreliable narrator—especially of him or herself. I try very hard to be honest in my fiction, again not because I find that morally superior but because it interests me, what that means, to try to be honest in fiction.

Barbara Browning, in an interview with Rebecca Miller (The Believer, 2017)

[mesogeios]

However bad life is, what’s important is to make something interesting out of it. And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff, snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes your phenomenal existence from moment to moment. How consoling—that this stuff goes on and that you can keep thinking about it and making that into something on the page.

Anne Carson explains an idea that she and Alice Munro have in common (attachment to the physical world and the details in life), from The Art of Poetry No. 88, Paris Review (via delphicoracle)

[poetsandwriters]

I was trying to redefine what we mean by a love story and the trope of the love story, to radicalize what we mean when we talk about the energy force that is love…What if we loved the earth as much as we claimed we loved our partners and lovers and children? Part of this hope includes remaking our myths and our archetypes and taking the stories different places than they have been, because all our mighty myths lead to war and destruction…

Lidia Yuknavitch, in “The Other Side of Burning” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2017)

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

life hack: u dont have to be a wolf to yell sad noises at the moon

[poetsandwriters]

The strongest argument I can think of for satire and parody is that despots and authoritarian regimes of all stripes hate it so.

Tony Eprile, from an essay in Scoundrel Time, as featured in “Writers, Editors Resist” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2017)

[andallshallbewell]

[dailyinspirationquotes]

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