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)
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)
I used to dream about our home, our children, about holding you in my arms and touching your face and hands and hair that used to belong to me, and now I just can’t wake up. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “The Bridal Party,” Saturday Evening Post, August 9, 1930.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. — Annie Dillard, from “Living Like Weasels,” Teaching a Stone to Talk (HarperCollins, New York, 2009, Kindle Edition)
The heart is split in two, irresolute between its desires. Yet the boat has to advance … night or day are merely shifting veils to be traversed. Advance with fierce courage. Not for the sake of men. For the sake of insoluble riddles. In utter secrecy the heart is split in two. —Tarjei Vesaas, The… Continue reading Tarjei Vesaas,
The Vale of Soul-Making 