part-time soulmate full-time problem

his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars

[strategicfalsehoods]

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before i knew you. It’s like I had the word ”book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word ”game,” and you taught me to play. I had the word ”life,” and then you came along and said, ”Oh! You mean this.”

Richard Powers - The Overstory

[strategicfalsehoods]

pink lip and powdered nose in the casket a dozen sobbing men in stiff suits / yes, even then, we are girls / especially then, we are girls / silent and dead and still / the life of the party.

Olivia Gatwood - Life of the Party

[strategicfalsehoods]

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.

Herman Hesse - Demian

[strategicfalsehoods]

“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.

“Neither could anybody else.”

“Go on!” He started. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.”

He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.

“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

[strategicfalsehoods]

[gesture toward the universe]

Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

[strategicfalsehoods]

I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, without having to say that I ran out into the street to prove something, that he didn't love me, that I wanted to be possessed, thrown over, that I wanted to have the wounds nailed shut.

Richard Siken - Crush

[strategicfalsehoods]

you’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to

Richard Siken, You Are Jeff, Crush

[strategicfalsehoods]

What Are You Insinuating? That We’ve Come to the Wrong Place?

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

[strategicfalsehoods]

Then go and do it, if you must. It is blind folly—but those who love you love you dearly.

Sophocles, Antigone

[strategicfalsehoods]

”Exactly; then our glances met, and then there was a current between us, like a spark of electricity running along a wire, was it not?”

”Yes, an uninterrupted current.”

”But you really felt me just before I went out, is it not true?”

For all answer I pressed his fingers tightly.

Oscar Wilde (?), Teleny

[strategicfalsehoods]

…his face and chest drenched with blood, a gruesome spectacle.

Homer, The Odyssey

[strategicfalsehoods]

The scene then changed, and shifted into the gorgeous towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, weird, beautiful and grand; to me the pianist's notes just then seemed murmuring in my ear with the panting of an eager lust, the sound of thrilling kisses.

Oscar Wilde (?), Teleny

[strategicfalsehoods]

This bad boy—whose moodiness came to be called the Baroque,

Richard Siken, Three Proofs

[strategicfalsehoods]

Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

[strategicfalsehoods]

This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

[strategicfalsehoods]

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

[strategicfalsehoods]

And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars,

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room