#prose novel

[lucidloving]

@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

[thepersonalwords]

You should only fall in love with someonewhose arms are open, and strong enough to catch you.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

[elysiumaze]

I don’t miss it, because I have my childhood more now than when it was happening...

Clarice Lispector in, Near to the Wild Heart.

[hoppipolla]

Did Tae Mhyung Ha know? That he seemed very lonely sometimes. Regardless of the solid flesh or distinct features, at times like that, he seemed like someone who would soon disappear.

LOVE FOR LOVE'S SAKE dir. Kim Kyun Ah (2024)

[localcosmicvoid]

"But the point is to live."

Slow Sunday rereading The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus & trying to find meaning again

[elektramouthed]

 I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that might be a kind of psychosis.  ‘You think meaning is psychosis?’  ‘An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.’  ‘I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.'  [...] I said, ‘How would you define psychosis?’  He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil:  Psychosis: out of touch with reality.  Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

Jeanette Winterson, from Lighthousekeeping

[xxrrisxx]

And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

Virginia Woolf

[ikarust]

i talk about tearing flesh from an arm with my teeth and you stare at me in horror like you haven't tasted blood before. i talk about being crushed like a small animal on a fast lane and you ask me how it's humanly possible of me to cling to the stone of the sidewalk the way i do. my mother could skin her hands at the sink and it would still not rid her from the truth that is that she has fed me her body and that she is convict to the manslaughter of her child.

quick question: how does one write about their mother without mentioning their mother? mine is a fortune teller. she tells me in the dead of the night while i am on the kitchen floor with the boning knife in one hand and and a towel in the other that i will never be loved right. that i will never find real love. that i will always suffer if i look for it.

mother knows best.

she tells me she destroyed herself for me and that i am selfish and cruel for not destroying myself for her. she begs me to be beautiful. she begs me to be the daughter she wanted to have. my friend tells me on the swing on a beautiful springtime evening that i am selfish and cruel for devouring every little piece of every damn thing that has ever tasted like love to me. and when i go home in the evening, my mother looks at me like she did the night she told me she wishes she'd killed me when i was a child. i tell everyone i am starving. my mother tells me she told me so.

i stare at the red in the ball of spit i hawked onto the bathroom floor. i retouch the scars on my thighs. i hack away at my hair with the big crafting scissors. i pray to god that i will wake up tomorrow beautiful and loveable. i wake up the same way. my mother tells me to never come back when i step out to leave for work. i tell her i am trying my best but nothing is working. she tells me she told me so. she tells me she's glad to see me in pain because i deserve it.

maybe i do deserve it.

i visit a clothing store and step into the fitting room just to see the way i am reflected back and forth in the front-and-back mirrors. i look and i see a morbid, mangled ruin the greatest what-could-have-been of all time. and by that i mean, i see a million possibilities in one. all the girls i could have been. and at the very center, where the image gets so small it's blurry and barely visible maybe i am beautiful. maybe i am loveable. maybe i find real love and maybe i don't suffer for it.

maybe i am the daughter my mother wanted.

[lucidloving]

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena // Alain de Botton, Essays in Love // Eden Robinson, "Writing Prompts for the Broken-Hearted" // Chloe Liese, Always Only You // Anne Carson and Euripides, An Oresteia // Two—Sleeping At Last // Studio Bones, SK8 the Infinity // Trista Mateer, "is it okay to say this?" // @moodylilac // D. H. Lawrence, "The Rainbow"

[outstanding-quotes]

Now that he was trying to find something out from me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

[wandereralix]

I wrote a poem about it, and then threw it away, because that's the last thing I need right now: More words dedicated to people who will never dedicate a single thing to me.

- Charlotte Green

[keatingwilde]

maybe romanticising my degree is the only viable option to get me through it

[thepersonalwords]

Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers

Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

[eldestdaughterx]

bless the daughter raised by a voice in her head - warsan shire

[elektramouthed]

 The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.

Elif Batuman, from The Idiot

[letterstomonkey]

Grief is a leaky faucet and a forged signature; The pipes froze over and you forgot to Call your mom back, and that was three days ago. Grief is addictive, Residual and graceless; I grieve in place of a Painted-by-hand Ceramic, potted plant. Grief is visceral itching A scabbing tattoo Sunday at 6pm Tumbleweeds in the pantry and my bedroom is sick of me; Grief is opening the blinds for the first time at 6pm Because it is better to start the day Dripping faucet and all, when the alternative is keeled over in a parking lot. Grief is a feeling, or a meaning a meal, a money order, a missing sock or a tearful walk- But I can grieve you in rooms I haven't stepped in yet, But I can grieve you in brush strokes on a blank page, But I can grieve you in how I cough up smoke. Grief is regret. Grieving you, like gawking at a full moon only to discover it was yesterday, so now what will you find in the sky to celebrate? Grief is the last time we looked at the moon at the same time, never knowing it, Grief is a leaky faucet.