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? 
"Students can get so bombarded in science classes and think that all is known. It's not. A book like this [ A Wrinkle in Time] can help them realize that we know some things, but really very very little." Shannon Lucid
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. F Scott Fitzgerald, "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. Joan Didion
Writing is not a mobile activity and – rampant hypochondria and/or genuine illness apart – historically, it seems to involve being in bed more than might be considered entirely reasonable. The onset of winter always reminds me of my early days as a scribbler, reading about all those Russian and Irish and Parisian writers' lives in suitably louche and tormented novels, or short stories, or memoirs. One element they shared – beyond narcissism, absinthe abuse and athletic sexual angst – was the presence of one - or more than one - writer in a bed and occasionally putting pen to paper. AL Kennedy in The Guardian
The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna’s breathing. I thought about waking her. But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, it’s always necessary. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
