Only to friends do I recite, and on request,
Not to all men, or everywhere
Horace
I am not building here a statue to erect at the town crossroads, or in a church or a public square. This is for a nook in the library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image. Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.
Michel de Montaigne
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
“For Grace, After a Party,” Frank O’Hara (via clavicola)
(via fleurishes)
(via chaotique)
331/ January 9, 2012 - Again, a disclaimer.
D.—
I know of this Filipino poet who broke up with his partner by saying: “I’m much too happy with you. I can no longer write.”
I wish to borrow those words while keeping all my words and keeping you. I’m much too happy with you but “I’m much too happy” does not say it right.
Instead I borrow from the past for contrast. The fastest way to use up all my words is to turn my inkwell upside down, so I’m letting it all spill out, the shadows of secrets that I tell you when we both can’t sleep because we’ve had too much coffee or laughter and lightness and everything else suffuses, becomes white noise. I need weight to anchor me to this page, and I look at my past for pulse, and I look at you and think of how I want my children to have your eyelashes.
We’ve talked about it before, how maybe we aren’t right for each other, how I’m too hopeless when you’re hopeful, and the reverse, but I’ll take my chances and fold my worries until we prove ourselves right by proving us wrong.
Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.
A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway (via itsherfactory)
(via estincelle)
But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing; the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up if you love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky. But believe me— it’s better to look at the sky than to live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear…
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (via girlwithoutwings)
(via girlwithoutwings)
The beauty of falling in love with someone is that you start doing it in small mouthfuls. You start breathing their scent until a part of your lungs is just suffused with them. You don’t notice, but you start picking at crowds until you see this one person. You thread more and more of your happiness on the appearance, on the existence of this other being. It is an inexplicable connection, this oneness that you start to experience. Soon, you unwind from the present and become addicted to the future. Every plan becomes furious and curls into pages and pages. You think about a place, some permanence. But in all of your fervour, you lose sight of what it is that made you whole. You start to cut and shape yourself into the ideal, into whoever it takes to be good enough.
And then you reach a day in your life when you are doing something mundane. For me, it happened as I brushed my teeth in the morning. I caught myself standing at a mirror, dressed in someone else’s favourite colour and wearing someone else’s gifts on my hands. I started noticing how unlike me I had become. And all for what? For the promise of this other person, this great love. It’s all untrue. Whatever they tell you about glances filled with meaning and sunny afternoons and dancing to Louis Armstrong in the deep midnights. All of it doesn’t exist. Because if you want that kind of thing, you have to give up something that is fundamentally you. You have to trust another human being to sleep next to you, skin to skin. Something inside of me snapped, that day, like an instinct that I had numbed and buried had suddenly caught fire. It was the day that I realized that in order to completely love another person, I had to first kill away a part of myself. I had to cut away something inside me and share it with them. It went deeper than novel tastes and music tapes. It was some part of a future, some dream. And I couldn’t do that. I still can’t do that.
