a-certain-ambivalence

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there's just nothing that beats being at home. the world will try to convince me i should be doing more and it's like yeah but im at home

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They taught you that you had to file yourself down to be acceptable; that you had to calm down or want less or smile more or feel less or speak less - that your passions were ugly and that your desires were selfish. You couldn't admit to the bad nights, that was burdensome. You couldn't ask for better, you couldn't cry that loudly. When you said "Look what I made", the answer was ".... Oh." You became a sectioned person - good and not-good. The prayer in public and that private, terrible sin.

And then they looked at you and said - why don't you trust anyone enough to let them in?

[a-certain-ambivalence]

IG: jasmineraye

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“I had no idea what I wanted, only that I wanted something, which is the worst kind of wanting.” - David Levithan

via @quotemadness

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me, a legal adult: when i grow up,

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Know the difference between being patient and wasting your time.

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via @defineyourgrind

[a-certain-ambivalence]

via @defineyourgrind

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“And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, ‘How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?’ And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I’ve written. I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?’ The wonder of it was, I told them that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something I hadn’t known was important will leap out and hover there in front of me, saying I am — I am the best moment of the day. I noticed two people were writing down what I was saying. Often, I went on, it’s a moment when you’re waiting for someone, or you’re driving somewhere, or maybe you’re just walking across a parking lot and admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed across the windshield. I thought, Ah, of course — I’d forgotten. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day.” - Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

via @quotespile

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Mandi Nelson

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“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between stories.”

— Margaret Atwood (via quotemadness)