word.

[wordsandshe]

And it’s amazing how much noise people ignoring each other can make.

Eoin Colfer, Benny and Babe

[wordsandshe]

I wonder sometimes what love really means. When I think of you, I think of scraping my knee on uneven pavement. Phase one is peddling. Peddling quickly and peddling confidently into unknown terrain. Phase two is pure bliss. Bliss in my bones and fire in my lungs. Phase three is loose gravel in my knee. Loose gravel encircled in tiny pools of my own blood. Phase four is waking up. Waking up to walk away.

Katie Safar, Words For No One

[wordsandshe]

There should be a word for this, these gaps between people and this yearning to fill it with contact, with connection and art and feeling. I was on the subway the other day and there was a girl sitting across from me, looking through pictures on her camera. I simultaneously wanted to talk to her and see the world through her eyes while also recognizing that such a desire must go unfulfilled and that it has been going unfulfilled for as long as we have been crowding ourselves into cities and taking public transportation, for as long as we have had the ability to think about life from the perspective of the people around us. This is something I’ve felt a few times, always for someone looking out a window or sitting alone or lost writing or sketching or thinking. I don’t know what I’m feeling, but there should be a word for this, this immeasurable sadness defined by the absence of contact that makes my hands want to reach out to a complete stranger.

typewriterdaily

[wordsandshe]

You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I'm looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

Louise Glück, Matins

[wordsandshe]

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

[wordsandshe]

Thank God we can’t tell the future. We’d never get out of bed.

Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

[wordsandshe]

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something … That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

[wordsandshe]

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche, paraphrased from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

[wordsandshe]

On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.

Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

[wordsandshe]

I watched a girl in a sundress kiss another girl on a park bench, and just as the sunlight spilled perfectly onto both of their hair, I thought to myself: ‘How bravely beautiful it is, that sometimes, the sea wants the city, even when it has been told its entire life it was meant for the shore.’

Christopher Poindexter

[wordsandshe]

But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though to twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen,

Margaret Atwood, excerpt from The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

[wordsandshe]

Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum – a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.

Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

[wordsandshe]

I wonder if the sad I'd be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.

— Succession

[wordsandshe]

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

— Isaac Newton, from Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855), vol II, Ch. 27

[wordsandshe]

1.

HE TELLS HER

He tells her that the earth is flat —

He knows the facts, and that is that.

In altercations fierce and long

She tries her best to prove him wrong.

But he has learned to argue well.

He calls her arguments unsound

And often asks her not to yell.

She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

— Wendy Cope, Differences of Opinion

[wordsandshe]

This we know:

We were

not meant

to suffer

so much

& to learn

nothing.

— Alice Walker

[wordsandshe]

Can you understand? Can I make you understand somehow? You have begun to mean the world; you have begun to mean poetry and heartbeats and inexplicable mood reactions and songs and scents and conflicting words which do not match yet somehow match. You are not only a series of question marks and abstract references: You are meaning itself. You are a bright inner composure of numerous elements. Now can you possibly understand—I am merely words. I used to believe I was merely words and I do not know whether I shall start hoping for something more. You planted that sense of hope in a secret deeply hidden place; it had walls made of bricks and huge abandoned gardens full of despair. It was covered in dusty waves and it was kept underground where no soul would ever walk. And you walked there—you planted hope. And now I cannot imagine myself without it.

— Katherine Mansfield