verysleepydiablo

[verysleepydiablo]

tag yourself

[verysleepydiablo]

[Writing] is a solitary independent activity in which practice can never bestow seniority. Fortunately anyone can take up the activity. Whatever the motives, […] the writing becomes as soon as I begin, a struggle to give meaning to experience. Every profession has limits to its competence, but also its own territory. Writing, as I know it, has no territory of its own. The act of writing is nothing except the act of approaching the experience written about; just as, hopefully, the act of reading the written text is a comparable act of approach.

To approach experience, however, is not like approaching a house. Experience is indivisible and continuous, at least with a single lifetime and perhaps over many lifetimes. I never have the impression that my experience is entirely my own, and it often seems to me that it preceded me. In any case experience folds upon itself, refers backwards and forwards to itself through the referents of hope and fear; and, by the use of metaphor which is at the origin of language, it is continually comparing like with unlike, what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant. And so the act of approaching a given moment of experience involves both scrutiny (closeness) and the capacity to connect (distance). The movement of writing resembles that of a shuttlecock: repeatedly it approaches and withdraws, closes in and takes its distance. Unlike a shuttlecock, however, it is not fixed to a static frame. As the movement of writing repeats itself, its nearness to, its intimacy with the experience increases. Finally, if one is fortunate, meaning is the fruit of this intimacy.

John Berger, from “The Storyteller,” Landscapes: John Berger on Art (Verso, 2016)

[verysleepydiablo]

“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.. It seemed so natural, to talk to him about odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.. But now she could think only of all the things she yet wanted to tell him, wanted to do with him.”

— Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche 

[verysleepydiablo]

“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.”

— Brooke Hampton (via khadlja)

[verysleepydiablo]

“I love you more than I could have ever imagined to love.”

— Kostas Karyotakis, from a letter to Maria Polydouri written c. April 1921

[verysleepydiablo]

“On a mountain top there’s nothing to disturb your happiness, there is just this unbounded silence, and you can see flowers, nothing but flowers, which perhaps signify kisses or tears or ecstasy or death, and everything is colour; there’s no standing still and no emptiness,”

— Max Frisch, tr. by Mike Mitchell, from “An Answer from the Silence,”

[verysleepydiablo]

“Hardly touching, I hold / What I can only think of / As some deepest of memories in my arms, / Not mine, but as if the life in me / Were slowly remembering what it is.”

— Galway Kinnell, from New & Selected Poems; “Night Poem,”

[verysleepydiablo]

“It’s become very apparent to me that the older you are the less praise you’re going to get. When you’re 3 and you paint a picture outside the lines, they give you gold stars. When you’re 10 and you score a goal, they take you out for ice-cream. But when you’re 17 and struggling to fit in, no one gives you a hug just for making it through the day. And when you’re 23 and pulling long hours at the office, no one asks if you’re alright. And you start to wonder if you are, if there’s a point to any of it. The answer is yes. Because good work, real good work that shapes your character, doesn’t need to be acknowledged. You grow in the silences, in the reflections, in the inhales and exhales that let you know you’ve made it from one moment to the other.”

— pat yourself on the back, you’ve got hands.  (via c0ntemplations)

[verysleepydiablo]

“I want to know you whether you’re afraid of sharks or spiders death or love. I want to know if it’s grammatical errors that drive you crazy or the people correcting them, if you’re more comfortable shaking sand out of your hair or snow, if you prefer coffee or tea, bars or board game nights. I want to know which of your friends you’ve cried in front of, if you’ve ever laughed chocolate milk out of your nose, or kissed someone you didn’t love. I want to know you the you beneath the layer of small talk always kept shined and smudgeless I’m just hoping one day you’ll invite me in.”

— Kristen Costello

[verysleepydiablo]

“how many of us go through someone else’s art in hopes of finding a piece of ourselves in their creations?”

—

[verysleepydiablo]

“A poem begins with a lump in the throat.”

— Robert Frost

[verysleepydiablo]

“When I taught creative writing at Princeton, my students had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.”

— Toni Morrison (via thegriffinsinkpot)

[verysleepydiablo]

“She’s in your head more than you’d like to admit. Not only is she biting on your mind but chewing on it too, shredding it between her teeth with the taste of pleasure. You’re thinking about her all the time, and it terrifies you; because you know craving her nearness rather than only her body means it’s beyond lust. The way her words dance around you worries you, you long for them now more than ever. You want her and you don’t know what you want, you know it’s more but you just don’t know how to reach it. You don’t want to come clean, you don’t want to confess; but something towards her is growing in you, and you know no road to stop it.”

—

[verysleepydiablo]

“Sometimes you are going to miss a person who was an almost to you. And feel sad because there is no name for that feeling. You just feel it in a way that makes you tired to your very bones.”

— Nikita Gill, Almost Feelings

[verysleepydiablo]

“I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful”

— Sylvia Plath, from Three Women (via lifeinpoetry)

[verysleepydiablo]

[verysleepydiablo]

“Pain so clean and alone. / Pain of hidden river-beds and unapproachable dawns.”

— Federico García Lorca, tr. by Judith Jedamus, from “Romance of the Black Pain,”