if i were there

What would I be doing now if I were there, not here?

Crazy
Benjamin Lebert

the pain one feels with someone

For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera

the idea of being in love.

In the darkness of the theater they fall in love. They fall in love not so much with each other, that's history, but in love with the idea of being in love, of liking someone that much. She puts her head on his shoulder and he doesn't say anything about it hurting his tennis arm.


Adults Alone [from The Safety of Objects]
A.M. Homes

a new mind.

A new world
is only a new mind.

To Daphne and Virginia [exerpt]
William Carlos Williams

I’m Not Saying This Right [excerpt]

What goes comes back. Come back
We never left each other.


I’m Not Saying This Right [excerpt]
Rumi

...a great poem

...and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Preface to Leaves of Grass [excerpt]
Walt Whitman

Andrew Wyeth - Christina's World

i feel infinite

There is a feeling that I had Friday night after the homecoming game that I don’t know if I will ever be able to describe except to say that it was warm. Sam and Patrick drove me to the party that night, and I sat in the middle of Sam’s pickup truck. Sam loves her pickup truck because I think it reminds her of her dad. The feeling I had happened when Sam told Patrick to find a station on the radio. And he kept getting commercials. And commercials. And a really bad song about love that had the word “baby” in it. And then more commercials. And finally he found this really amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet.

Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.

“I feel infinite”

And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it’s not the same unless you’re driving to your first real party, and you’re sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain.

Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky

...a body without a soul.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

G. K. Chesterton

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden

You Fit Into Me

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye


You Fit Into Me
Margaret Atwood

it puzzled him...It hurt him...It angered him, too

...It puzzled him how much he could have loved her just three years ago. And how much less he loved her now. Back then she was all he could think about. All he wanted. She was everything good and desirable.

Now she felt heavy to him. Stifling, unhappy, impatient. It hurt him to see the disappointment he caused. It angered him, too, because he thought he was doing what was right....

California Girl
T. Jefferson Parker

at the top of your lungs.

Borrowed from New York Craigslist Missed Connections...

You don’t have to love someone quietly, you don’t have to simply dream about them. Love them at the top of your lungs. And you can dream about them, but dream with them, next to them.

Kicking and Screaming

I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.

Kicking and Screaming
Noah Baumbach

Klimt - Life Tree

What matters most is

What matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

Charles Bukowski

Three Short Poems

"The underground roads
Are, as the dead prefer them,
Always tortuous."

"When he looked the cave in the eye,
Hercules
Had a moment of doubt."

"Leaning out over
The dreadful precipice,
One contemptuous tree."

Three Short Poems
W.H. Auden

A Very Short Song

Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.

A Very Short Song
Dorothy Parker

Rite of Passage

As the guests arrive at my son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

Rite of Passage
Sharon Olds

these do not matter.

Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

-Rumi

David Hockney

Portrait of Nick Wilder