March 2012
“I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.”
—Sylvia Plath
Hercules.
- Meg: This one is different. He's honest and sweet, and wouldn't do anything to hurt me.
- Hades: He's a guy.
Strawberry Runners.
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more.
~ Sylvia Plath
“But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”
—Evelyn Waugh
No Dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
~ Dylan Thomas
Madame Bovary.
She loved the sea only for its storms and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immense gratification of her heart,—being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.
~ Gustave Flaubert
“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
—Roberto Bolaño
I Am.
I am the red brand
on the shoulder of the condemned,
the gallows and the rope,
the ax and the block,
the whip and the cross.
I am the lion’s tooth
in the flesh of the gazelle.
In my veins I have
the blood of the slave trader.
Hangman,
I have deserved the hunger of the wolves.
My victims have left me nothing
but their deaths.
~ Anne Marie Derese, translated by Judith Skillman
Livvie.
They began to walk along. She stared on and on at him, as if he were doing some darking spectacular thing, instead of just walking beside her. It was not simply the city way he was dressed that made her look at him and see hope in its insolence looking back. It was not only the way he moved along kicking the flowers as if he could break through everything in the way and destroy anything in the world, that made her eyes grow bright. It might be, if he had not appeared the way he did appear that day she would never have looked so closely at him, but the time people come makes a difference.
~ Eudora Welty
“I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.”
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
