January 2012
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“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope...”
– Neil Gaiman
December 2011
7 posts
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“We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be...”
– Vaclav Havel’s Critique of the West (via theatlantic)
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“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place...”
– Lawrence Durrell +
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“At kung sakaling magtagumpay ang impeachment na ito laban sa akin, ano sa...”
– Chief Justice Corona
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Believe This, Richard Levine
All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling work of turning a yard from the wild to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing from a hidden, though not distant, perch; a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding like, Can you believe this, believe this, believe? Can you believe this, believe this, believe? And all morning, I did believe. All morning, between break-even bouts with the unwanted,...
November 2011
9 posts
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Between the Wars, Robert Hass
When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. They were death’s idea of twilight, the whole notes of a requiem the...
Tumblr and I have been growing apart. I’m sorry, Tumblr. But thank goodness you’re always just here.
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Poem to an Unnameable Man
You have changed me already.
-Dorothea Lasky, first line from “Poem to an Unnameable Man” from Black Life
[read entire poem here]
(via mythologyofblue)
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“[College is] this moment when your whole life is in front of you. It’s a magical...”
– Claire Dunphy (Modern Family)
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October 2011
62 posts
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paintrefrains:
Matthew Macfadyen reads the...
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“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted...”
– David Foster Wallace
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“I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another...”
– Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
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“All I see out in the world is loneliness, and it frightens me.”
– The Remains of the Day (1993)
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Episode, Jennifer Michael Hecht
Too much to drink last night and now the symbol claps of shame in August. Had I been wine-wise, I’d have been at work for hours by now, but no. Television is more relieving than I’d guessed, I watched a show I’d never seen before because I tend from terrors on the molestation line. It was easier to take than TV news whose theme today is also how someone who had once been a girl had been ...
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“Listening to Tom Waits makes me wish that I’d been drinking whisky and...”
– Florence Welch
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Prayer, Marie Howe
Someone or something is leaning close to me now trying to tell me the one true story of my life: one note, low as a bass drum, beaten over and over: It’s beginning summer, and the man I love has forgotten my smell the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter when he picked me up and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down, among the scattered daffodils on the dining room table. And...
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THE DAILY TANGINA: WHEN THE CURE IS WHAT KILLS
Hi. Welcome to a nightmare.
Imagine you have a shabu addiction. Imagine that that addiction lands you in a mental hospital, and not just any mental hospital, not those sweet and swanky white-halled Hollywood havens with pretty nurses doling out pills in little cups. This is the third world, and you’ve been pounding third-world drugs, so you get the shit-smeared National Center for Mental Health...
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“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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Unhappy Hour, Richard Siken
Going to a party where I knew you’d be, dudes bobbing for boyfriends, eyes shining like candy apples. I want to be a lamppost, or the history of plumbing. I am tired of being mysterious. You are drinking rum next to the laughing skullheads and I am unhappy because I am dead and I miss you. Once a year, day of the dead, you think you’d think of me more often. These people shoulda dressed up as...
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A Hundred Ways to Say Your Name, Tania De Rozario
I avoid speaking your name in conversation, throwing it to the air as if it were nothing more than an assumption of you; it is my last mode of defence. The last item of clothing to discard before I realise I’m naked in public.
Because they can hear it in my voice. I know. Even in that one short syllable that means everything and nothing; your name is as common as you are rare. As easy as...
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“Do not hasten the future; in agony too there is time.”
– Karl Shapiro
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“My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. “Why...”
– Tom Waits
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Just Kids →
When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on Haight Street, listening to the sound of the electric typewriter coming from the other room. Eugenides...
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Unwritten Law, Louise Glück
Interesting how we fall in love: In my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often— so it was in my youth. And always with rather boyish men— unformed, sullen, or shyly kicking the dead leaves: in the manner of Balanchine. Nor did I see them as versions of the same thing. I, with my inflexible Platonism, my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time: I ruled against the indefinite...
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“We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories...”
– The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
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Trying to Raise the Dead, Dorianne Laux
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song, remember, “Ophelia,” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m crazy. They don’t know me that well. Where are you now? I feel stupid. I’m talking to trees,...