mythologyofblue

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"An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it one can produce almost anything."

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

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But when you lose someone, you don’t lose them all at once, and their dying doesn’t stop with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say a thousand goodbyes. You hold a thousand funerals.

-Sara Seager, The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir

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"I'd come to accept such uncertainities with a quiet heart."

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Don't have stories; have sentences.”

-Gordon Lish

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"We are butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."

-Carl Sagan

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Who loves longer, a man or a woman? -Anton Chekov

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“You have to make love to the damage in your mind.”

-Tiana Clark

[mythologyofblue]

To be a good

ex/current friend for R. To be one last

inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship

advice for L. To be advice

for my mother. To be a more comfortable

hospital bed for my mother. To be

no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,

America for my uncle, who wants to be China

for me. To be a country of trafficless roads

& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go

fast. To be a cyclone

of laughter when my parents say

their new coworker is like that, they can tell

because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,

can’t be one of them. To be the one

my parents raised me to be—

a season from the planet

of planet-sized storms.

To be a backpack of PB&J & every

thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming

their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,

homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D

& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,

simple decoration for the new apartment

with you. To be close, J.,

to everything that is close to you—

blue blanket, red cup, green shoes

with pink laces.

To be the blue & the red.

The green, the hot pink.

-Chen Chen, "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities"

[mythologyofblue]

Even the earth rests. -Peter Heller, The Painter

[mythologyofblue]

You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place. -Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories

[mythologyofblue]

“A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.” -Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

[mythologyofblue]

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[mythologyofblue]

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after." -Michael Baughman, excerpt from A River Seen Right (Lyons Press, 1995) p. 68-69, paraphrasing Henry David Thoreau

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"A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand."

-Ray Bradbury, excerpt from the short story, "A Sound of Thunder"

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“Telescopic view of Saturn.” A new manual of the elements of astronomy, descriptive and mathematical. 1868.

[mythologyofblue]

“Long before God the Father, there she was – God the Mother. Where did she vanish to, this great mother goddess? How did we women become so completely dispossessed? It wasn’t that I wanted to replace a male god with a female god; it wasn’t that I wanted to find a religion at all. I was simply looking for some sense that women might have worth. And I found it: there in the old stories of my own native land, I found it. Filled with images of women creating, women weaving the world into being, I took up knitting. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, I began to knit myself back into being. I had never thought of myself as being a particularly creative soul, but I discovered that creativity was a wide-ranging affair. I simply thought about what brought me joy, and I began to cultivate it. I dug my hands into this strange foreign soil, and I began to grow things. I began to reacquaint myself with the soft animal object that was my body. Slowly, spending more and more time outside, focusing on the wisdom of my senses rather than on what was going on inside my head, I began to weave myself back into the fabric of the Earth.” -Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

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Martian Canals

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” ― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

This is the story of how an optical illusion and the mis-translation of one word led to the Victorians believing there was life on Mars…

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