i never loved a man i trusted as far as i could pitch my shoe till i loved you

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"I don't subscribe to the notion that a poem is doing its job when people get angry, no. The idea of a poem 'doing its job' is a really foreign one to me. It's not a kitchen implement, that either works or doesn't. It's not a machine whose function is to manufacture human reaction, and if it manufactures enough of the right kind of reaction then it can be judged successful. It's a place that goes onto the map if people return and return to it over a long period of time. Its job is to be there, for the people who want to come to it."
--Patricia Lockwood


"Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'."
--Terry Pratchett


"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words."
--David Foster Wallace, The Pale King


"Tell me the best fantasy lands aren't deep, deep conversations. The one you had when everyone else was asleep at a slumber party when you were nine years old on the basement floor covered by a green outdoor rug next to her brother's barbell stand. Or the one you had on the bus with that boy when you were fourteen who said girls didn't go out with him because he had a paunch and didn't play football. And you admitted a few things about yourself that didn't sound good. Or the one that kept you in the dining hall so you missed all your afternoon classes in college. Or the one that led you to elope. Or the one last week when you talked about how you felt about failing and failing again until one of the children came running in because you'd forgotten dinner. Tell me, aren't the best fantasies where you have those conversations you don't want to leave, like an island, ancient volcano, surrounded by jeweled waters, warm in the sunlight, icy in the shadow of its caves--a place you remember best for being rare, for being far in the middle of the sea, uninhabitable, or unbearably too inhabitable, left before we ruined it."
--Jimin Han


"Manifesto"
( trigger warning: wartime violence )

--Catalina Ferro


"Missed Time"
My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning--
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.
--Ha Jin


"I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere."
--Albert Camus