a cooler version of yourself, a cooler version of your dad, a crueler version in my mind

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"If we live in too close proximity to a person, it is as if we kept touching a good etching with our bare fingers; one day we have poor, dirty paper in our hands and nothing more. A human being's soul is likewise worn down by continual touching; at least it finally appeared that way to us--we never see its original design and beauty again."
--Friedrich Nietzsche


"With new friends, what you have in common is more circumstantial: colleges, jobs, hobbies, acquaintances-of-the-hour. What old friends share goes deeper than that. Your lives can branch off in completely different directions, but always, you share that knot of a past--heartbreaks and sleepovers and screened-in porches--and the raw, peculiar memory of yourself which, in part, belongs to them."
--Elise Juska, Getting over Jack Wagner


"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

"All of them?

"Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."
--Margaret Atwood


"Upon Neglecting the E in Plumes"
I want white plums.

I admit the inspiration for this desire
and impulse
is my own dyslexia; the inability to read,
as my mother called it once,
that which I do not want to.

So this is the distillation of poetry,
the true profession of the poet;
to take feathers the color of snow
and insinuate fruit.
--Jaida Jones