“I could start fires with what I feel for you.”
—Fires, David Ramirez
June 2013
“You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people that you choose to be around.”
—(via sbinthecity)
“I love unmade beds. I love when people are drunk and crying and cannot be anything but honest in that moment. I love the look in people’s eyes when they realize they’re in love. I love the way people look when they first wake up and they’ve forgotten their surroundings. I love the gasp people take when their favorite character dies. I love when people close their eyes and drift to somewhere in the clouds. I fall in love with people and their honest moments all the time. I fall in love with their breakdowns and their smeared makeup and their daydreams. Honesty is just too beautiful to ever put into words.”
—Unknown
“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
—David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
“I will wade out till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers. I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air, alive, with closed eyes.”
—E.E. Cummings
“I saw him hip-deep in some icy water, chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It’s his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.”
—Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“There is no shame in being hungry for another person.” — Augusten Burroughs
“She kisses like a sweet devouring, and I don’t know where to touch her because I want all of her.”
—John Green
“You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Notes From The Underground
“I bet if we dusted her heart for fingerprints, we’d only find yours.”
—Rudy Francisco
“K is seven, still young enough
to know his body is an instrument,
that to move is to create
rhythm. His small feet stomp out
an invocation on the bleachers.
Pencils become drumsticks.
His mouth, a beat-box.
He is a song asking everything
why it is not dancing.” —Stevie Edwards, “For K,” published in Radius (via nps2013)
to know his body is an instrument,
that to move is to create
rhythm. His small feet stomp out
an invocation on the bleachers.
Pencils become drumsticks.
His mouth, a beat-box.
He is a song asking everything
why it is not dancing.” —Stevie Edwards, “For K,” published in Radius (via nps2013)
“Opening your heart and being courageous and telling people that you care about them or like them or that you think they’re special only makes you a better, bigger, kinder, softer, more loving person and only attracts more love in your life.”
—Amy Poehler (via modernhepburn)
“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was.
You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.” —Isaac Asimov (via substantia-nigra)
You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.” —Isaac Asimov (via substantia-nigra)
“It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything.”
—Lois Lowry (via kari-shma)
“But I have seen the best of you and the worst of you, and I choose both.”
—Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye, “An Origin Story” (via larmoyante)
ugly, by warsan shire
Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
She was splintered wood and sea water.
They said she reminded them of the war.On her fifteenth birthday you taught her
how to tie her hair like rope
and smoke it over burning frankincense.You made her gargle rosewater
and while she coughed, said
macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell
of lonely or empty.You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island,
if her thighs are borders?What man wants to lay down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things,but God,
doesn’t she wear
the world well.
“
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,
And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.
“But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.” —Pablo Neruda
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.” —Pablo Neruda
“I have buried you in every place I’ve been. You keep ending up in my shaking hands.”
—Bon Iver
Play
“Every once in a while,
you flicker across my heart
like a lighthouse does an ocean,
and I wonder who you’re calling home.”
“I want you because there aren’t any good words for who you are. The only ones that come to mind are earnest, sad clichés like ‘amazing’ and ‘magnetic’ and ‘fascinating’ and I don’t want to use them, but on the other hand they are the only words, and cliché or not they are honest words and I’m not sure consulting a thesaurus at this point would be genuine. And it’s not that I want you officially, like I want your last name or your Sunday mornings or your hard shiny promise, I just want to absorb you. I want to know what you know, want to hear your stories, want to filter through them gently and get lost in them, them and the soft hypnosis of your hands in my hair.”
—Mila Jaroniec
“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
“All this time
I drank you like the cure when maybe
you were the poison.” —Clementine von Radics
I drank you like the cure when maybe
you were the poison.” —Clementine von Radics
“Your absence has gone through me
like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its colour.”
—W.S. Merwin, “Separation”
“They tell us the people we love are 72.8% water-
there is no such thing as crying,
we are only trying to turn ourselves inside out.
This is a noble pursuit” —Lewis Mundt, excerpt from “Water”
there is no such thing as crying,
we are only trying to turn ourselves inside out.
This is a noble pursuit” —Lewis Mundt, excerpt from “Water”
May 2013
“I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say ‘I love you I love you I love you’ while stripping. I want you so bad it stings.”
—Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction
“I would love to say that you make me weak in the knees but to be quite upfront and completely truthful you make my body forget it has knees at all.”
—Derrick Brown, Love Language
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (via femme-ex-machina)
“You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?
What man wants to lie down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?” —Warsan Shire - Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?
What man wants to lie down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?” —Warsan Shire - Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth
“One day when you live above the stars we will look down and use the cities to navigate by. You will be unrecognizable then, as dream as all the dreams the dead have had. The cities will burn with lamps that no one tends and the lamps will never close their eyes and they will speak no language. You will see the ships of glass and gold pass between the lamps and think that this means some ancient thing and will try to read our fate in this emptiness, the emptiness that will howl all the names until the end of time.”
—Brian S. Ellis, “Movement 5 (Vapors): The Final Words of the Oracle at Delphi,” from a suite of poems published in Nailed Magazine (via nps2013)
“
Scars; they seem so beautiful at times. I’ve got many, deep and shallow. They aren’t self-inflicted, well consciously they aren’t. They cover my arms, my legs, even my fingers are painted with them. To others it might seem like a cry for help or a careless attitude but for me it’s my whole life story engraved on me. Every scar, every bruise has a life of its own and a space in my heart. They either remind me of a place or a person.
It sucks because sometimes you want to forget about those memories and move on but what can you do about the scars? Sadly, there is no magic wand to rub them off of your body. Even if they fade away over the years, the impact still stays there in your head. The mental scars are the worst of its kind. They haunt you even in your dreams. These scars cause you to stay stuck at a point of your life where you’re unable to move or breathe. At some point of time your soul is so heavily bruised that the physical pain is nothing but a mere pinch. This is the time where you start feeling like an outsider in your own life and when you look down at yourself you realize how helpless you are and how stagnant you’ve become. Every scar you look at is bursting with frustration. It’s screaming to bleed out.
But then something strange happens over time, you start to admire them and appreciate them. Why? It is because you realize that these very scars show you how far you’ve come. It shows you that you may have faced hurdles but you still have a long way to go. It tells you not to give up even if every inch of your body is marked and dashed, to celebrate the scars instead. Even if you don’t make it in the end at least you have something to show to the world that you never backed down.
” —Pramiti Sapru (via sentirlanada)
“The Greek word for ‘return’ is ‘nostos’. ‘Algos’ means ‘suffering’. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
—Milan Kundera (via penseesduchoeur)
“The more light you allow within you, the brighter the world you live in will be.”
—Shakti Gawain (via megmatic)
“Oh comely, I will be with you when you loose your breath chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left.”
—Neutral Milk Hotel
“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.”
—Assata Shakur
“Never ignore a person who loves you, cares for you, and misses you. Because one day, you might wake up from your sleep and realize that you lost the moon while counting the stars.”
—Nico Lang
Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.
Henry Rollins
