“Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.”
—Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, first published 1940
be the serpent under it, lady macbeth
be the serpent under it, lady macbeth, for anon
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Unsex me, she’d said. Well. We all make mistakes.
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She watched her husband ride to battle, settled her soul to the fact that he might never ride back. But he does.
After this, all decisions are easier. It doesn’t hurt as much, the possibility of losing something you thought was already gone. It doesn’t seem impossible, the evil deeds you say you’ll do. Restraint, in the end, is immaterial, dust on the breeze. Something slots, heavy, in her chest, and turns, and then she sees. She sees for the first time. This is how freedom tastes. This, this is how you get what you never wanted; what you never knew you needed at all.
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She doesn’t want her husband to be a king. She wants him to want to be a king. The same? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
… it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Nightmares” from Seven Nights, trans. Eliot Weinberger (via proustitute)
Chris Cleave, Little Bee
a reader avatar, a compulsive liar and an unreliable narrator walk into a bar
Or, you know what they’re saying: don’t fall in love with a writer.
when you have been together for ten years, when the light between you is beginning to flicker in announcement of your final act, she will hood her eyes and quirk her lips and ask your help in choosing false identities. the first names you will pick as if from a hat, dated rarities whose wrongness makes hilarity catch the edges of the tension that has long been building between you; the last name she will select herself, a sharply poignant hidden joke she will only tell you about after the fact. you will roll your eyes but learn the cover stories she weaves for you, and they will be such a raw departure from the lives you’ve lived together and apart that you will have to fight the urge to laugh.
you will take a week off work. she will pack the car.
when the morning of your exodus comes—when you are locking the doors to the home you’ve shared and checking your pockets again for essentials—you will wait for the anticipation to overtake her. you will wait for the giddy exhilaration you once knew by heart, the near-hysterical joie de vivre that embarrassed you for years, to crease her face and shudder her hands and make her look a decade younger. it will not come. instead, she will smile with her fingers curled around the steering wheel and avoid your gaze in the rearview mirror, and a few miles up the road she will roll her shoulders and crack her neck and turn to you, call you by that name that is not your own.
you will blink. she will become someone else in the time it takes you to open your eyes.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”
Jim Jarmusch (via worn-whorehouse-stairs)
memewolves-archive-deactivated2
We tell people they are “strong” when we are uncomfortable with their pain and would prefer that they shut up and not bother us with it. To say “but you are strong” is telling someone “I don’t think you should feel that way,” and it’s not a compliment. I don’t think that strength means being invulnerable, or pretending that you are. The belief that silence and stoicism are inherently good qualities is how you end up dressed up like a bat punching criminals in an alley – it’s not a good road to emotional health.Be sad. Be angry. Let your heart break – in the diner, on someone’s futon, in the park, on the way to the zoo, at brunch, over drinks, in the therapist’s office, on the bus – Wherever it breaks, let it break all the way open, let it run out and down and spread out in a soggy puddle at your feet. Say, “I’m sorry, I can’t listen to you today, my heart is broken. Will you sit with me a while and I’ll tell you about it?“
Say, “I can’t take care of you today, but you can take care of me, and maybe tomorrow I will take care of you, and we can trade off like that for a while, okay?”
Say, “I love you, and I love that you think I’m strong, but I don’t feel like being strong today. I feel like being angry and crazy and sad. Can we go to the movies or just sit here quietly or take a walk or talk about it or not talk about it?“
Your friends may get scared when you do this. If you, the “strong” one can break, what does that say about them? That’s why they push back at you and try to remind you of your strength, when what you need is for them to stand by you in your pain and weakness. They don’t have to solve that pain, they just have to bear witness to it. Maybe they don’t know how – a lot of people don’t know what to do in the face of other people’s pain. They want to fix everything, and if they can’t fix it they feel inadequate. As the “strong” one you can help them out with this by saying “You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to do anything. Just be with me, and listen, and love me, and I’ll love you back. That’s all I need – to know that you love me, even when I’m sad and scared and don’t know what to do next.”
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B. Yeats (via forbiddenalleys)
the narrator's lament.
someone should write a book where the main character slowly falls in love with the reader.
the first time you crack my spine, you will be too young for me. lent and spent, dogeared, i will weather your sticky-fingered touch with the bad grace of library books everywhere, handled without care for years without end and plastic-coated, built to withstand the worst of humanity. you will throw me in your backpack and the next time i see the light of day will be at a double-header baseball game, patchwork men yelling peanuts in the distance and your brothers shouting for home. you will hide me in the folds of your oversized sweatshirt and callously drip mustard from your corn dog onto my twelfth page, and i will feel it smear and stick against my thirteenth and hate you, hate you, hate you. i will twist my language to obscurities that your youthful eyes will find obscene; i will press my letters together until you are forced to squint against the sinking sun; i will slice open the pad of your index finger once, twice, and nevermind the blood.
you will return me, abandon me, forget me. i will have known you would.
when you find me again, adulthood will not yet be yours, but you will be a far cry from childhood; you will tuck me carefully beneath your arm and walk me through the library doors yourself. when you crack my spine, you will let one bitten nail drag lightly down my pages, and your touch will be soft enough that i will forgive you the child you once were. you will be the first person in half a decade to take the time to unstick my twelfth and thirteenth pages, and when you see the caked, yellowed stain there you will laugh, wondering, as though you know it was you that left it. as though you remember me. i will open for you, this time, as i refused when we first met, showing you all that i can bear to this early—you are young yet, untrusted, and i will not reveal to you nuances scholars have missed. still, it will be enough, and you will keep me hidden under your duvet until well into the night, a flashlight caught between your cheek and shoulder so you can see every inch of me, even in darkness.
lent and spent a thousand times over, and no reader will ever have seen me as you shall.
writingquotes-deactivated201509
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.
Graham Greene (via writingquotes)
Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable - your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers - and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.
Black Telephone, Richard Siken (via charliebronsons)
andreagetsinspired-blog reblogged
“Adjectives are frequently the greatest enemy of the substantive.” - Voltaire “[I was taught] to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations.” - Ernest Hemingway “The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.” - Clifton Paul Fadiman “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.” - Mark Twain “The road to hell is paved with adjectives.” - Stephen King “[The adjective] is the one part of speech first seized upon and worked to death by novices and inferior writers.” - J.I. Rodale “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.” - Ezra Pound “The adjective has not been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” - E.B. White “[Whoever writes in English] is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective.” - George Orwell “Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun.” - William Zissner
If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,” 1943 (via postsatire)
andreagetsinspired-blog reblogged
“But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.”
- Charles Darwin, in a letter dated October 1, 1861 [x]
Mathias Malzieu, The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart