myfictionaladventures

[myfictionaladventures]

“I’m not a woman, I’m a doorknob leading to a quiet existence.” - Agnes Martin, 1973

[myfictionaladventures]

I hope I will see the day when the gay movement becomes just a part of the fabric of society.

Peter Flinsch, one of the last remaining homosexual survivors of the Nazi regime. "Branded by the Pink Triangle" by Ken Setterington

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"You're about as weak as this match." Carol held it burning for a moment after she lighted her cigarette. "But given the right conditions, you could burn a house down, couldn't you?"

"Carol" or " The Price of Salt" by Patricia Highsmith

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But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

Margaret Atwood, from The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)

[myfictionaladventures]

I remember once in middle school I wanted to read "Forged by Fire" by Sharon Draper but at the time I didn't know the name or author but I knew the book was red. So I walked into the school's library and went to the fiction section and pulled out the first red book I saw, and it was THAT book. I was reminded of that because today when I went to the library's book sale, I was sad so I was just looking around aimlessly and read "Margaret Atwood" on the side of a book. It was vaguely familiar so I picked it up and realized that it sounded familiar because it was The Handmaid's Tale and I've been wanting to read it for SO LONG. I even had it on hold at the library. It made me feel a lot better so I've come to the conclusion that books are magic and they are always looking out for readers that need them. ✨📚✨

[myfictionaladventures]

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Margaret Atwood "The Handmaid's Tale"

[myfictionaladventures]

Believing In The Work Of Human Hands

Marcella - Brooklyn, New York Entered on March 5, 2006

My grandmother took in laundry and cooked other people’s meals. She smoked from the minute her feet hit the floor until the last second before bed. She was an unlikely artist and she would have laughed at the word. Still, she made every little scrap that came her way into something beautiful.

She taught me to make stuff, too. Her small world, no wider than kitchen to rocking chair, reverberated with color, the yarns and threads and wool and cotton remnants that miraculously became scarves and mittens and pillows and rugs. Her hands were like the fingers of a witch, worn, twisted and gnarly, and they wrought magical transformations. She transmitted this mystical knowledge to her daughters and granddaughters. I am always surprised when I begin to work in a new medium, and my hands remember how to do something I’d forgotten I’d been taught.

Making something unique is a unique joy. I found as a teacher that my students always seized the opportunity to create a tangible object. Advanced Latin students were thrilled to make a puppet set for Tela Charlottae. When I suggested making our own santons to a high school French class, I was astounded by the alacrity with which those cool and popular kids rifled through the recycling bin to find materials. In a blink, we had a little village of soda-bottle-and-construction-paper figurines. My students made houses with second-language labels and keychain people and origami animals following second-language directions. On the days we made stuff, nobody fussed, fought or fretted. They were too busy learning to worry about petty problems.

I believe that in making stuff, we invent·and reinvent·ourselves. It’s no accident that even hardened prisoners respond to the opportunity to paint or work with wood. It is a visceral pleasure to hold a painting or a quilt that your own hands made. There is also a primal satisfaction in teaching people to make something. It is a way of passing on the essence of human existence.

Nana’s abilities made her a person with power far beyond her economic means. When I hold her hairpins, I touch her image. When I hold the wedding afghan she made me, knowing she would never live to see me married, I hold the little edges of her soul that she shaped with a needle and embedded in bits of yarn. When I look at the embroidery I made with the skills she taught me, I see my link in a chain of knowledge going back beyond any human comprehension, and I feel like I’m forging a new link when I show my great-niece how to thread a needle.

[myfictionaladventures]

Perfection is static, and I am in full progress.

Anaïs Nin 'Henry and June'

[myfictionaladventures]

Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn't have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from mango street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with big flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. And if you opened the little window latch and gave it a shove, the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in. There'd be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcycles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry. Only trees and more trees and plenty of blue sky. And you could laugh, Sally. You could go to sleep and wake up and never think who likes you and who doesn't like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy.

Sandra Cisneros "The House Oh Mango Street"

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I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I’m me. One day I’ll jump out of my skin. I’ll shake the sky like a hundred violins.

Sandra Cisneros ‘The House on Mango Street’ (via lil-moony)

[myfictionaladventures]

Everything remembers something. The rock, its fiery bed, cooling and fissuring into cracked pieces, the rub of watery fingers along its edge. The cloud remembers being elephant, camel, giraffe, remembers being a veil over the face of the sun, gathering itself together for the fall. The turtle remembers the sea, sliding over and under its belly, remembers legs like wings, escaping down the sand under the beaks of savage birds. The tree remembers the story of each ring, the years of drought, the floods, the way things came walking slowly towards it long ago. And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches where it was broken. The feet remember the dance, and the arms remember lifting up the child. The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away, everything it lost and found again, and everyone it loved, the heart cannot forget.

Joyce Sutphen ‘What the Heart Cannot Forget’ (via sleepy-girl-club)

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When I say that she was the greatest, I mean that she resembled a circus. She was not brightly colored, nor was she composed of three rings, but under a tent in the middle of a starlit field on a summer night, you could see her in just a t-shirt and forget how unhappy the elephants were.

“The First Girl,” Rob MacDonald (via speioritur)

[myfictionaladventures]

In the multiple peregrinations of love, Sabina was quick to recognize the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones, particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died completely and left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller echoes.

Anïs Nin ‘A Spy in the House of Love’

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He tucked her in gently and with all the neatness of a flyer's training, using the deftness of long experience with camping. She lay back accepting this, but what he tucked in so gently was not a night of pleasure, a body satiated, but a body in which he had injected the poison which was killing him, the madness of hunger, guilt and death by proxy which tormented him. He had injected into her body his own venomous guilt for living and desiring. He had mingled poison with every drop of pleasure, a drop of poison in every kiss, every thrust of sensual pleasure the trust of a knife killing what he desired, killing with guilt.

Anais Nin 'A Spy in the House of Love'

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It was when she saw the lives of spies that she realized fully the tension with which she lived every moment, equal to theirs. The fear of committing themselves, of sleeping too soundly, of talking in their sleep, of carelessness of accent or behaviour, the need for continuous pretending, quick improvisations of motivations, quick justifications of their presence here or there. It seemed to Sabina that she could have offered her services or been of great value in that profession. I am an international spy in the house of love.

Anais Nin 'A Spy in the House of Love'

[myfictionaladventures]

Going Gone - Anne Sexton

Over stone walls and barns, miles from the black-eyed Susans, over circus tents and moon rockets you are going, going. You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going. An old woman calls up to you from her deathbed deep in sores, asking, "What do you keep of her?" She is the crone in the fables. She is the fool at the supper and you, sir, are the traveler. Although you are in a hurry you stop to open a small basket and under layers of petticoats you show her the tiger-striped eyes that you have lately plucked, you show her specialty, the lips, those two small bundles, you show her the two hands that grip her fiercely, one being mine, one being yours. Torn right off at the wrist bone when you started in your impossible going, gone. Then you place the basket in the old woman's hollow lap and as a last act she fondles these artifacts like a child's head and murmurs, "Precious. Precious." And you are glad you have given them to this one for she too is making a trip.

[myfictionaladventures]

At sixteen Sabina took moon-baths, first because everyone else took sun-baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

Anaïs Nin 'A Spy in the House of Love'