L'Etranger

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

The Stranger
Albert Camus

terminally numb

This one girl who I had been watching most of the night stood squashed in the middle of the front row, and when she caught me looking at her, I gave her a smile. She made a gagging look and turned back to the band, swaying her head to the beat. And I got really disgusted and started thinking, what was this girl’s problem? Why couldn’t she just have been nice and smiled back? Was she worrying about imminent war? Was she feeling real terror? Or inspiration? Or passion? That girl, like all the others, I had come to believe, was terminally numb.

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Ellis

one of those rare smiles

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

if I sing

And if I sing you are my voice,

[excerpt]
e.e. cummings

all you can ask for in a friend.

[My friends] looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that's all you can ask for in a friend.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chobsky

To call myself beloved

did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

The Fragment [excerpt]
Raymond Carver

before I saw you.

You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you.

Slow Show
The National

and there it stayed.

When I fell in love with her...I really had no choice. My heart jumped into her and there it stayed.

Silent Joe [excerpt]
T. Jefferson Parker

better to live

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

"Adam's Diary" [excerpt]
Mark Twain

worse than a lie.

Generally speaking, we can and should say everything. We just have to choose the right time, otherwise the truth can be worse than a lie.

Night Watch [excerpt]
Sergei Lukyanenko

stay black, and die.

Work?
I don't have to work.
I don't have to do nothing
but eat, drink, stay black, and die.

Necessity [excerpt]
Langston Hughes

burn together

The seeds of love have taken hold and if we won’t burn together, I’ll burn alone.

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Ellis

ghosts

poetry always demands all my ghosts.

Always [excerpt]
Rane Arroyo

recurring dream

borrowed from ???

completeness

It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer

still, in my love,

There is still, in my love,
so much room and so many words for you.
Your entire world can fit
into my open, spread-out arms.
Come, plant your gaze in me,
make a home for yourself in my memory.

The Forgotten [excerpt]
Abraham Joshua Heschel

On the Metro

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book — Cioran, The Temptation to Exist — and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

On the Metro [excerpt]
C. K. Williams

laughter for no cause

...I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful...

Vita Nuvo [excerpt]
Louise Glück