"Curious about the problem of identity, I decided to photograph myself every day for a year. I was interested in when I would forget. The obsession with forgetting has been central. Having forgotten my mother, what she looked like, what she was like, how she treated me before she died when I was twelve, is still an abiding concern, though I have a much stronger sense of self now. But in 1972, not remembering meant, to some extent, not having existed, having to create a self without a foundation and trying to raise a daughter without remembering having been a child." Melissa Shook via even cleveland
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. Jonathon Safran Foer from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information. Grace Paley
When I write, my only concern is always accuracy. I try to write accurately from the poise of mind which lets us see that things are exactly what they seem. I never worry about beauty, if it is accurate there is always beauty. I never worry about form. If it is accurate there is always form. Lew Welch via Aubrey Road
This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat.
From "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolf
Photo by Feaverish on Etsy
What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.
Hell, I said, I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?
Yes. I want to ruin you.
Good, I said. That’s what I want too.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929
Photo from the Geology Teaching Slides of Dr. Arthur Gibbs Sylvester
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free. Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins
It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week. Ezra Pound
from the ugly earring:
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once. It’s the telling of a story, and the absence of a story. It’s telling a story through its absence. Practicalities, Marguerite Duras via le temps perdu (love this blog)
Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around. EL Konigsburg, From the Crazy Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways, everyday. David Foster Wallace in his speech at Kenyon College in 2005 via crankreport
“These were the people I lived with, these were my friends, these were my family, this was myself...there was no separation between me and what I was photographing." Nan Goldin from Art News
Just because they say, "Action," doesn't mean you have to do anything. Al Pacino to Jesse Eisenberg NYT
"If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed." Jean Cocteau
"To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there." John Banville, The Sea
"The home straight of my novel is in sight, but I'm tired, tired, tired and the news is doing nothing to restore my energiesOh, Best Beloveds, I am tired. I'm almost too tired to talk about the things that are tiring me. Then again – as with bad dentistry, unpleasant personal experiences and unpleasant gentleman callers – there's something minutely empowering about writing down the source of your woes and peering at them in effigy. It can become a small rehearsal for future change." AL Kennedy in The Guardian
Photo: Contempt (via ?)
When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write… You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through. Ernest Hemingway via through the screen doors of discretion
Used Furniture Review: What does your revision process look like? 
