the king's speech

those poor young blokes had cried out in fear, & no-one was listening to them.

my job was to give them faith in their voice and let them know that a friend was listening.

the things they carried, tim o'brien

in a way, i guess, she's right: i should forget it. but the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. you take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. the memory--traffic feeds into a rotary up in your head, where it goes in circles for awhile, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. as a writer, all you can do is pick up a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. that's the real obsession. all those stories.

...and sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. that's what stories are for. stories are for joining the past to the future. stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller

What great gravity is this that drew my soul toward yours? What great force, that though I went falsely, went kicking, went disguising myself to earn your love, also disguised, to earn your keeping, your resting, your staying, your will fleshed into mine, rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul, the soul that I fear, the soul that I loathe, the soul that: if you will love, I will love. I will redeem you, if you will redeem me? Is this our purpose, you and I together to pacify each other, to lead each other toward the lie that we are good, that we are noble, that we need not redemption, save the one that you and I invented of our own clay?

I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.


I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew and image, I bled a poem of you. You were pretty, and my friends believed I was worthy of you. You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only one able to lead you. You see, love, I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you , lest you talk it back to me, lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed.


I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not my friend; you have slid up warmly to the man I wanted to be, the man I pretended to be, and I was your Jesus and, you were mine. Should I show you who I am, we may crumble. I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.


I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I trust by your easy breathing that you are human, like me. My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come into the knowing of each other? Is this God's way of meriting grace, of teaching us the labyrinth of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees, that which He is sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet, has he formed our being fractional so that we might conclude one great hope, plodding and sighing and breathing into one another in such a great push that we might break through into the known and being loved, only to cave into a greater perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our acceptance? Begging for our completion?


We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other.


Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered eye, your heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him.


Will we be in ashes before we are one?


What great gravity is this that drew my heart towards yours? What great force collapsed in my orbit, my lonesome state? What is this that wants in me the want in you? Don't we go at each other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands and feet, with clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! We cannot know each other!


I am quiting this thing, but not what you think. I am not going away.


I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.


I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin it is time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.


God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.

Nobody Is Thinking About You, by Roger Rosenblatt

nobody is thinking about you.

yes, i know you are certain that your friends are becoming

your enemies; that your grocer, garbageman, clergyman,

sister-in-law, and your dog are all of the opinion that

you have put on weight, that you have lost your touch,

that you have lost your mind; furthermore, you are convinced

that everyone spends two-thirds of every day commenting

on your disintegration, denigrating your work, plotting your

assassination.

i promise you: nobody is thinking about you.

they are thinking about themselves--

just like you

we are all connected

thought of you

i thought of you and where you'd gone,

and let the world spin madly on.

here's to the future

here she comes: the future.

forget about the past.

we're gonna celebrate the future.

seeing as it's new year's day,

you probably expect me to get all sentimental, yeah?

well you're exactly right.

here's to the future.

the only limitations are the limits of our imagaintion.

dream up the kind of world you want to live in.

dream out loud at high volume.

that's what we do for a living.

U2

@1989 lovetown tour

& again,

all of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness

de saint-exupéry

the street of crocodiles

"On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun--the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins, the mysterious black morellos that smelled so much better than they tasted, apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons. And next to that pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead octopuses and squids--the raw material of meals with a yet undefined taste, the vegetative and terrestrial ingredient of dinner, exuding a wild and rustic smell."

-Bruno Schulz

big sur

"...no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self imposed agony... it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time...

There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universe more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication...Macrocosms and microcosms and chillicosms and microbes and finally you got all these marvelous books a man aint even got time to read em all, what you gonna do in this already piled up multiple world when you have to think of the Book of Songs, Faulkner, Cesar Birotteau, Shakespeare, Satyricons, Dantes... We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it..."

-Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

" i had forgotten the world could be so lovely,
i had become so accustomed to living within myself "

-herman hesse

ignorant before the heavens of my life

ignorant before the heavens of my life,
i stand and gaze in wonder. oh the vastness
of the stars. their rising and descent. how still.
as if I didn't exist. do I have any
share in this? have i somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? does my blood's ebb and flow
change their changes? let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.

-rainer maria rilke

"Optical" pluralism or "perspectivism" does not preclude the existence of an objective reality. It does, however, tie the validity of the different "views" of that reality to particular standpoints rather than to some absolute Truth. As such, it underscores the inherent futility of any attempt to compare different cognitive outlooks to one another in terms of their "correctness."

-Social Mindscapes (Zerubavel)

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming--a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Wind, Sand and Stars)

no one belongs here more than you, miranda july

"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his."

"That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it."

"We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond."

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real."

"They hold this person's hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back. This person almost can't believe it, it seemed so real, this person's heart was broken and has healed and now this person hardly knows what to think."

cyranose de bergerac

a kiss, when all is said, - what is it?
an oath that's ratified, - a sealed promise,
a heart's avowal claiming confirmation, -
a rose-dot on the 'i' of 'adoration,' -
a secret that to mouth, not ear, is whispered, -
brush of a bee's wing, that makes time eternal, -
communion perfumed like the spring's wild flowers, -
the heart's relieving in the heart's outbreathing,
when to the lips the soul's flood rises, brimming!

emma goldman

"I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."

[I read this quote while waiting outside of my professor's door today. I look up who Emma Goldman is, and turns out she is an anarchist O_o!]

have no envy, no fear

some are reaching.
few are there.
wandering from a hero's chair.
some are scared to fly so high.
well this is how we have to try.

have no envy, and no fear.
have no envy, no fear.

...everyday we try to find we search our hearts and our minds.
the place we used to call our home can'tbe found when we're alone.

have no envy, no fear.
have no envy, no fear.

-joshua radin

jane eyre

"after a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in drear solitude, i have for the first time found what can truly love- i have found you. you are my sympathy - my better self- my good angel. i am bound to you with a strong attachment. i think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my eart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one." -mr. rochester


"whether is it better, i ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at marseilles- fevered with delusive bliss one hour- suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next- or to be a village school-mistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of england?" - jane eyre

feverish, impassioned cries to jump-start passive hearts!