commonplace book

the best way to write is to read, voraciously

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Nothing happens in an instant. Nothing starts happening and nothing finishes happening. History doesn't begin anywhere. And it doesn't end.

Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay (182)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

If you were able to hear lime juice, it would sound like violins.

Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock (247)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

It may be fruitful to consider me a philosophical psychopath.

Terrance Hayes, "Wigphrastic," How to be Drawn (14)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it.

Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock (177)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (24)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

By the time I had the permanent line, the cold infusions went in very close to my heart. I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt. But I'm just going to say it felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours.

Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay (39)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

We are indeed a strange freak of Nature, and upon the success of our exhibition does our happiness and the well doing of others depend.

Tyehimba Jess, Olio

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Every girl I've ever loved was a bridge to somewhere else.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (86)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

I knew this wasn't making love; this was more like making hate.

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (40)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (51)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Come & diminish me, & map my way.

John Berryman, "13," 77 Dream Songs

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Love has a body.

Ann Bannon, I Am a Woman (105)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars.

Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn (108)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

She had learned to need love too much to think seriously about death.

Ann Bannon, I Am A Woman (28)

[rachelscommonplacebook]

But we were England's, still colonials, possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”

[rachelscommonplacebook]

I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down to the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke.

Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”

[rachelscommonplacebook]

Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek.

Thomas Hardy, “The Ruined Maid”