It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love. ― Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (Vintage; Reissue edition, June 18, 1989)
Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning. ― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Vintage, January 1,… Continue reading Angela Carter
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick. — Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (Mariner Books; Reissue edition, October 15, 1992) Originally published January 1, 1955.
I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that. — Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (The Franklin Library; First Thus edition, January 1, 1980)
We had hung together in a vast common loneliness almost like love. — Barry Hannah, from “Two Gone Over.” High Lonesome (Grove Press, 1996)
That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect… You can’t control life, at least you can control your version. — Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction (Doubleday, 2004)
You are beautiful like demolition. Just the thought of you draws my knuckles white. I don’t need a god. I have you and your beautiful mouth, your hands holding onto me, the nails leaving unfelt wounds, your hot breath on my neck. The taste of your saliva. The darkness is ours. The nights belong to… Continue reading Henry Rollins
We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. I’m not sure why it must be so, but it is. – Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Ballantine Books; Anniversary, Subsequent edition, September 30, 2003) Originally published September 1, 1988,
I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things out of this marred and clumsy world… — W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore (Wildside Press, 2005)
Nothing is peaceful sometimes. The emptiness is full. I’m not afraid of it now. — Charles R. Johnson, from “China,” The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (Serpent’s Tail, 1988)
The Vale of Soul-Making 