Evenings I sit in the hostel kitchen, writing, with a pot of strong tea and a candle for comfort. The immense quiet is broken only by those snaps and creaks that inhabit old houses. I am partial to old things: old peeling doors, rusty gates, overgrown paths. Old things know how to relinquish the past;… Continue reading Janice D. Soderling
When we hold each other in the darkness, it doesnt make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other, we feel not safe, but better. ‘It’s alright,’ we whisper, ‘I’m here; I love you.’ And we lie: ‘I’ll never leave you.’ For just… Continue reading Neil Gaiman
Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore. — Ernest Hemingway, from “A Way You’ll Never Be,” Winner Take Nothing. (Scribner; 1 edition, January 1, 1966)
I couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn’t wanted to know. — James Baldwin, from “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), Going to Meet the Man. (Vintage; Reissue edition, April 25, 1995)… Continue reading James Baldwin
And if you couldn’t be loved, the next best thing was to be let alone. — L.M. Montgomery
I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door. — J.D. Salinger, “A Boy in France,” Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945.
…all words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal. – Steven Millhauser, In the Penny Arcade: Stories. (Phoenix [an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd] December 2, 1999) Originally published 1985.
They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would be made none the less solitary by the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then, the desrt of humanity around them to press this insulated pair together? If they should be cruel to one another, who was there to be kind to them?… Continue reading Nathaniel Hawthorne
Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Nice Quiet Place. (1930)
The Vale of Soul-Making 