#Excerpt

[shisasan]

[philosophors]

“The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't do or say the things he thinks.”

— Clarice Lispector

[quillscales]

"You know… There's always room in Waterdeep for two Mr. Dekarios'- Ugh." Gale shook his head as he paced in his cluttered lab, every surface covered with arcane artifacts and open tomes, some bookmarked with notes on eloquent expressions of love. "That sounds far too casual," he mumbled, fingers tapping on his chin.

"Ah!" He waved his finger in the air, stopping abruptly. He picked up a small, glowing crystal, tossing it from hand to hand as he thought. "Perhaps…" He placed his arm low and bowed deeply. "Would you do me the honour of joining the Dekarios clan?"

Gale straightened up and sighed, placing the crystal back on a crowded shelf. "No. That doesn't work. What if he doesn't want my name? I shouldn't put that pressure on him."

His eyes flicked to the golden ring on his work table. He had finally perfected it, and soon, it would be Astarion's. Whether he said yes or not, though… Gale's heart swelled, and he smiled to himself, his fingers lingering on the cool metal. He was confident that his lover would.

"Maybe something more traditional?" Gale wondered aloud, his gaze fixed on the gleaming band as he turned to face the door, imagining Astarion standing there. Sliding down onto one knee, he rehearsed, "Would you marry—Agh!" The sharp pop of his knee cut through the quiet of the lab, and he crumpled to the floor with a pained cry.

Gale let out a frustrated laugh from his spot on the floor, rubbing his knee. "Of all the times," he muttered.

[safenottosay]

She didn't really look the type to cause a rile; But oh, like fire was her smile.

[lucidloving]

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy // Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women // Robin Roe, A List of Cages // Hayao Miyazaki, Kiki's Delivery Service // Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 // D. H. Lawrence, The Plumbed Serpent // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart // Alice Oseman, Radio Silence // Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

[maybuds]

from “Brian and Roger Eno: ‘Capitalists want you to be constantly stimulated’”

[Text ID in ALT text]

[mournfulroses]

T. S. Eliot, from The Complete Works of T. S. Eliot; "The Confidential Clerk,"

[sprachgitter]

on storytelling and repetition

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

[aurevives]

— Aure Vives, excerpt from ‘Hymnal bite’

[lazyydaisyyy]

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Author’s Note” from The Left Hand of Darkness

[shisasan]

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own [originally published 1929]

[philosophors]

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

— Carl Jung

[m--bloop]

A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain

[19silvermirrors]

Reaching 💙❤️

[lucidloving]

Megan Chance, The Spiritualist // Edith Eger, The Choice (Google search results) // Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe // Holly Black // Ariesa Ra // Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here // J. U. Scribe, Roman Identity // Hannah Harrington

[Requested by @lynnimal]

[maybuds]

From Silence Is a ‘Sound’ You Hear, Study Suggests by Bethany Brookshire, published in the New York Times