"You are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone’s feelings. You are embarrassed to be alive."

- Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

"It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on this earth as though I had a right to be here."

- James Baldwin

"I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing - that light is everything - that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do."

- Mary Oliver, The Ponds

• "I love everybody because I love you."
• "So please hurry, leave me, I can't breathe. Please don't say you love me."
• "I glow pink in the night in my room. I've been blossoming alone over you."
• "When I saw the girl looked just like me, I thought 'must be lonely loving someone trying to find their way out of a maze'."
• "I steal a few breaths from the world for a minute, and then I'll be nothing forever, and all of my memories, and all of the things I have seen will be gone."
• "But you knew from the start it was us, didn't you? It just took me a while till I knew."
• "I haven't given you what you need. You wanted me but couldn't reach me. I'm sorry, it should’ve been me."
• "And I am relieved that I'd left my room tidy. They'll think of me kindly when the...

"To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones."

- On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

"Who has not asked themselves at some time or the other: am I a mosnter or is this what it means to be a person?"

- Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.”

- Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“When we came home together

We found the inside weather.

All of our love unended.”

May Sarton, A Light Left On

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

• "Golden, as I open my eyes. Hold it, focus, hoping: take me back to the light."
• "I know you were way too bright for me. I'm hopeless, broken, so you wait for me in the sky."
• "Strawberries on a summer evening. Baby, you're the end of June."
• "Walk in your rainbow paradise, strawberry lipstick state of mind. I get so lost inside your eyes, would you believe it?"
• "Your wonder, under summer skies."
• "All the lights couldn't put out the dark running through my heart. Lights up and they know who you are. Do you know who you are?"
• "Don't you call him 'baby'. We're not talking lately; don't you call him what you used to call me."
• "I confess, I can tell that you are at your best. I'm selfish, so I'm hating it."
• "I noticed that there's a piece of you in...

• “You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand. You're a wallflower.”
• “So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
• “There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
• “I would die for you. But I won't live for you.”
• “I just want you to know that you’re very special… and the only reason I’m telling you is that I don’t know if anyone else ever has.”
• “I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they're here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how sm...

"I chose ‘Daylight’ as the last song on the album because it recognises past damage and pain, but shows that it doesn’t have to define you." __________________________________________

Step into the daylight and let it go.

Just let it go.

(I wanna be defined by the things that I love.

Not the things I hate,

Not the things I'm afraid of,

Or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.

I just think that...

You are what you love.)

Berna, 2 de janeiro de 1947

[...]

Não haveria necessidade de lhe dizer, então. Mas não pude deixar de querer lhe mostrar o que pode acontecer com uma pessoa que fez pacto com todos, e que se esqueceu de que o nó vital de uma pessoa deve ser respeitado. Ouça: respeite mesmo o que é ruim em você - respeite sobretudo o que você imagina que é ruim em você - pelo amor de Deus, não queira fazer de você mesma uma pessoa perfeita - não copie uma pessoa ideal, copie você mesma - é esse o único meio de viver.

Juro por Deus que se houvesse um céu, uma pessoa que se sacrificou por covardia - será punida e irá para um inferno qualquer. Se é que uma vida morna não será punida por essa mesma mornidão. Pegue para você o que lhe pertence, e o que lhe pertence é tudo aquilo que sua vida exige. Parece uma vida amoral. Mas o que é ...

Tu, tu che sei diverso, almeno tu nell’universo

Un punto sei che non ruota mai intorno a me

Un sole, che splende per me soltanto

Come un diamante in mezzo al cuore.

“I read what you leave in public spaces. The songs you reference. The quotes you quote. I know it’s about me. I can feel you thinking of me. I want to tell you that I know and admit that I feel the same. But I can’t. Not yet.”

- pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“It’s when you hold eye contact for that second too long or maybe the way you laugh. It sets off a flash and our memories take a picture of who we are at that point when we first know “This is love.” And we clutch that picture to our hearts because we expect each other to always be the people in that picture. But people change. People aren’t pictures. And you can either take a new picture or throw the old one away.”

- pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“You had this expression on your face, like you weren’t quite sure you were supposed to be on Earth.”

- pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, 'We're remembering'. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we're got on damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around." "Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a...

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"E da noite pro dia, o espírito inteiro de uma nação passa a ser orientado pelo ódio. Pessoas doces, gente boa, que frequentavam sua casa, se divertiam e não se metiam na vida de ninguém, se transformaram em nazistas.

Os poucos Austríacos que não foram enfeitiçados pelo fascismo, não perceberam, mas já estavam vivendo em uma sociedade fascista, quando Hitler finalmente invadiu o país sob aplausos de multidões.

Agora já era tarde. Mesmo que o Fuhrer desistisse da Áustria, ela já havia se transformado em uma nação de fascistas. Aquele povo alegre havia se transformado no povo que odeia. Mesmo que Hitler recuasse, o país já estava perdido sua identidade. Já estava conquistado. E, otimista, achando tudo normal.

Democraticamente, a Áustria, então, tornou-se, uma ditadura fascista.

Em 2018, faz 80 anos da anexação da Áu...

''I am generally thankful and happy about what I've got in my life. But I always feel like there is a black hole in my heart that no one would understand, some pain just won't go away and I'm trying hard to live with it.''

“My mom left the Philippines when I was five years old. My sisters and I were very young at the time. We basically raised ourselves because my dad doesn’t talk much. It must have been hard on my mother. She wasn’t able to come back because of her visa status, and we didn’t have the money to visit. We talked on the phone about once a month. She’d send us letters, and clothes, and toys. It took ten years of working and saving for her to finally bring us over. I think the reunion was much different than she imagined. She probably expected us to be grateful, but all of us were teenagers by then. We weren’t used to being told what to do. So we were pretty awful to her. And my father divorced her soon after we arrived in America. But her sacrifice paid off. We all graduated college and have good jobs. But it wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized how lonely those ten years ...

“I love walking around the city. I catch the Metro North train at 11:40 every morning. I go to the same gym that I’ve been going to for forty years. Then I just start walking. If you take big strides it really stretches you out. And there are millions of other people walking around. You never feel alone. People smile at you. On weekends I’ll bring my granddaughters with me and we’ll tour different neighborhoods. We’ve seen ten or twelve so far. Sometimes I get to borrow them for the whole afternoon. But they’re at sleep away camp right now so I’m missing them a lot. And that’s about it. I do a little shopping at the thrift store. I stop and read the paper. I eat at outdoor restaurants. It’s simple but I found what makes me happy and I’m doing it. And when I’m heading home at night, sometimes I think: ‘I just had the best day of my life.’”

“My mother was sick for most of my life. She had nineteen years of treatment for Hodgkin’s disease. But she was the kind of mother that would come home from chemotherapy, vomit in the bathroom, and then still cook dinner for all of us. And she did this while getting a PhD in clinical psychology. She just loved being a mother. Even after the chemotherapy destroyed her ovaries, she adopted two more children. She passed away I was twenty-five. Shortly after she died, I realized that I couldn’t remember her voice. I’ve just never been an oral person. It was maddening. It felt almost disrespectful. I had all these old videos of her, but they were silent. So I thought I’d just never know what she sounded like. Then last night, my sister found a small cassette in an old box. It was from my mother’s answering machine. And she picked up the phone during one of the recordings. It was a m...

"When you talked earlier about after a few years how a couple would begin to hate each other by anticipating their reactions, or getting tired of their mannerisms - I think it would be the opposite for me. I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone - the way he's going to part his hair, which shirt he's going to wear that day, knowing the exact story he'd tell in a given situation. I'm sure that's when I know I'm really in love."

Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?

• “Rows of houses sound asleep. Only street lights notice me.”
• “No one can unring this bell, unsound this alarm, unbreak my heart new. God knows, I am dissonance, waiting to be swiftly pulled into tune.”
• “And somehow i’ve fallen in love with this middle ground at the cost of my soul.”
• “If brokenness is a work of art, surely this must be my masterpiece.”
• “I’m only honest when it rains. An open book with a torn out page, and my ink’s run out.”
• “These wild oceans shake what’s left of me loose just to hear me cry mercy. A string wind at my back, so I lift up the only sail that I have: this tired white flag.”
• “Now i live a waking life of looking backwards, looking backwards; A model citiz...

"In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt."

“You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.”

― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

Minha alma

Sabe que viver é se entregar

Sabendo que ninguém pode julgar

Se teve que olhar pra trás ou não

Talvez

Se a vida me trouxer o que eu pedi

Te encontro e faço tudo o que quiser

Te dizendo "O Sol renasce amanhã"

A vida é tão mais vida de manhã

Quando vejo você

Saiba você é

Meu Sol

Ela

Tem entrelinhas fáceis de rimar

Me encosta o colo e fica onde quiser

E me molha como um rio que lava o chão

Só pra você

Eu tenho os olhos e meu coração

Espero o teu sorriso e as tuas mãos

Não esquece, o Sol renasce amanhã

A vida, enfim vivida de manhã

Quando tenho você

"Life feels like Pac-Man sometimes, I guess. It's the same game all over again. Same board. Same ghosts. Sometimes, you get a bunch of cherries but eventually and inevitably, those ghosts catch up with you."

“Do you remember when you read us the sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis and we argued about them?”

“I do indeed. And that’s a long time ago.”

“Ten years nearly,” said Lee. “Well, the story bit deeply into me and I went into it word for word. The more I thought about the story, the more profound it became to me. Then I compared the translations we have—and they were fairly close. There was only one place that bothered me. The King James version says this—it is when Jehovah has asked Cain why he is angry. Jehovah says, ‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.’ It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin.”

'Speak now or forever hold your peace,' the words said by preachers at the end of wedding ceremonies all over the world, right before the vows. It's a last chance for protest, a moment that makes everyone's heart race, and a moment I've always been strangely fascinated by. So many fantasize about bursting into a church, saying what they'd kept inside for years like in the movies. In real life, it rarely happens.

Real life is a funny thing, you know. In real life, saying the right thing at the right moment is beyond crucial. So crucial, in fact, the most of us start to hesitate, for fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But lately what I've begun to fear more than that is letting the moment pass without saying anything.

I think most of us fear reaching the end of our life, and looking back regretting the moments we didn't speak up. When we d...

Yeah, we talk about getting older

But there's so much we haven't done yet

Some days I'm not here, I don't get dressed

And I cursed my bedroom but I left it all alone

'Cause all this time I'm runaway, runaway, runaway, runaway, gone

And everyone is changing

And the storefront's rearranging

I picked up a quarter and I just saw my face

But it's all coming back now

Like the feeling isn't over

Hey, I know I was lost but I miss those days

I said la-la-la-la-la-la-lost, but I miss those days

Well I'm talking, la-la-la-la-la-la-lost, but I miss those days

Yeah

Those days when I'd sit on my sister's ro...

During the iHeartRadio reputation Release Party, a clip of Taylor saying the following at an earlier Secret Session for select fans was played:

"We threw a big New Year’s Eve party in London this year, and I was thinking about how everybody talks and thinks about who you kiss at midnight. Like it’s this big romantic idea of like, ‘Who are you gonna kiss at midnight, like ring in the New Year.’ And I think that is very romantic. But I think there’s something even more romantic about who’s gonna deal with you on New Year’s Day. Who’s willing to give you Advil and clean up the house. I think that states more of a permanence. So I was thinking about that, and I wrote this song called ‘New Year’s Day.’ There are two lines in this song that I had been saving for a long time, for the right moment, and I had picked them for this song, and I’m really exci...

"It's not about what you do; it's about who you are.

It's not about who you are right now; it's about who you could be.

It's not about what could go wrong; it's about what will go right.

It's not about listening; it's about getting up and dancing."

“Ela é uma música que mexe muito comigo, com a questão da fé. Eu sempre tive uma relação muito difícil com Deus. Não conseguia entender o Deus que tira a mãe de uma criança. Essa música me aproxima um pouco da minha relação com a fé, da minha relação com o mágico, da minha relação com a minha mãe. Essa música é muito profunda, de verdade pra mim.”

"Dentro do vernáculo budista, há um pássaro chamado Gumyo. Esse pássaro tem um corpo e duas cabeças. Mesmo que duas entidades tenham ideologias ou filosofias diferentes, suas vidas são unidas por uma única forma — esse é um princípio budista manifestado sob a forma de um pássaro.

Seria ideal se todos pudéssemos cultivar em nós a capacidade de dignificar uns aos outros em vez de ficarmos bravos com nossas diferenças."

Você só recebe

Uma vida

Então, aprecie este momento

Aprecie este dia

Seja gentil com os outros

Seja gentil consigo mesmo

Shigeko Matsumoto

"You’re not a bad person. You’re a very good person, who bad things have happened to. Besides, the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are."

"Let your head rest in my hand. Relax. I got you. I promise. I won't let you go. Hey man. I got you. There you go. Ten Seconds. Right there. You in the middle of the world."

• "I think you're damaged, delusional and believe in a higher power. In your case, it's yourself. And somebody loves you... Oh, if I had to punch that face, I'd avoid your nose and teeth too."
• "Every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain. You need me or you're nothing — because we're just alike, you and I. Except you're boring. You're on the side of the angels."
• "Yeah okay, I did. But the flirting's over now, Sherlock; Daddy's had enough now! I've shown you what I can do, I cut loose all those people. All those little problems, even thirty million quid just to get you to come out and play. So take this as a friendly warning, my dear: back off. Although I have loved this, this little game of ours, playing Jim from IT, playing gay. Did you like the little touch with the underwear?" "People have died." "That...

Your heart understood mine. In the depth of the fragrant night, I listened with ravished soul to your beloved voice. Your heart understood mine.

— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

As rosas amo dos jardins de Adônis,

Essas volucres

amo, Lídia, rosas,

Que em o dia em que nascem,

Em esse dia morrem.

A luz para elas é eterna, porque

Nascem nascido já o sol, e acabam

Antes que Apolo deixe

O seu curso visível.

Assim façamos nossa vida um dia,

Inscientes, Lídia, voluntariamente

Que há noite antes e após

O pouco que duramos.

(O guardador de rebanhos e outros poemas, 1997.)

…I want enough time to be in love with everything.

— Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it. Nick teased out of me things I didn’t know existed. A lightness, a humour, an ease. But I made him smarter, sharper. I inspired him to rise to my level. I forged the man of my dreams. We were happy to pretend to be other people. We were the happiest couple we knew. And what’s the point of being together if you’re not the happiest? But Nick got lazy. He became someone I did not agree to marry. He actually expected me to love him unconditionally. Then he dragged me, penniless, to the navel of this great country and found himself a newer, younger, bouncier cool girl. You think I’d let him destroy me and end up happier than ever? No fucking way. He doesn’t get to win. My cute, charming, salt-of-the-Earth, Missouri guy. He needed to learn. Grown-ups work for things. Grown-ups pay. Grown-ups suffer consequences.

"He talked about the ocean between people. And how the whole point of everything is to find a shore worth swimming to."

- Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens agenda

[The homosexual] is a prodigious consumer of signs—of hidden meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality. Exclusion from the common code impels the frenzied quest: in the momentary glimpse, the scrambled figure, the sporadic gesture, the chance encounter, the reverse image, the sudden slippage, the lowered guard.

— Harold Beaver, “Homosexual Signs,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 99-119, 105.

• “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
• “I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone. I sit on the side with a coffee and write in my daybook, I examine the flight schedules that I've already memorized, I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember.”
• “I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
• “'I feel too much. That's what's going ...

Most of my life has been spent trying to shrink myself. Trying to become smaller. Quieter. Less sensitive. Less opinionated. Less needy. Less me. Because I didn’t want to be a burden. I didn’t want to be too much or push people away. I wanted people to like me. I wanted to be cared for and valued. I wanted to be wanted. So for years, I sacrificed myself for the sake of making other people happy. And for years, I suffered. But I’m tired of suffering, and I’m done shrinking. It’s not my job to change who I am in order to become someone else’s idea of a worthwhile human being. I am worthwhile. Not because other people think I am, but because I exist, and therefore I matter. My thoughts matter. My feelings matter. My voice matters. And with or without anyone’s permission or approval, I will continue to be who I am and speak my truth. Even if it makes people angry. Even if it make...

The amount of quiet I need does not exist in the world, from which it follows that no one ought to need so much quiet.

— Franz Kafka, from Letters to Ottla and the Family (1909 - 1924)

Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, ‘Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.’ So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

— Marina Abramovic

"He took something from me. He took little pieces of me, little pieces over time, so small I didn’t even notice, you know? He wanted me to be something I wasn’t, and I made myself into what he wanted. One day I was me, and then suddenly I was lying for him, and agreeing to be married and wearing a ring, and being a bride. Until I was standing there in a wedding dress, and I wasn’t me anymore.

And even then, I would’ve married him. I would have. I lost myself for a long time. And now that I’m finally me again, I can’t… I love you. I love you more than I loved him. I love you. And that scares the crap out of me because you took a piece of me today, and I let you.

And that will never happen again."

Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.

— Maya Angelou

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this –But oh my dear, I can’t be clev...

“How little we must think of ourselves to only expect tolerance. What about acceptance? What about celebration and love and embracing difference rather than merely tolerating it? What might happen if we raise the bar higher?”

- Samira Wiley

“You’re breakin’ my heart,” Bucky murmurs, terribly raw. “You know that? It breaks my heart just looking at you.”

Steve watches him, the pull of his jacket across his big shoulders, his dirty boots muddying up Steve’s floor, the dark head of hair, and suddenly he can’t do anything but wonder at it, at all of it: the entirety of his wholly fantastic and stupendously unbelievable life. What did he ever do to deserve all this — him, Steve Rogers, the son of an immigrant and a vanishing man, any other boy in an alleyway with scraped-up knees? Who is he? Who is he but any other man off the street? And to be here, on this unlikely day, looking at Bucky now.

Time is so funny. Life is so strange.

“I’ve loved you,” says Steve, “Since the beginning of time, Buck.”

Bucky stares at him, silent and still.

There’s this feeling I get after a firefight, when the shells are still bouncing across the ground, and I’m still a little blind and deaf, but the whole world is crystal clear, and I could just fall to the ground and cry like a baby because I’m still alive. The first time I felt it I thought I was going to burst out of my skin. And then everything rushed back so quick I felt like a newborn. The whole world was brand-new and I was on top of it. I could swallow it whole.

You think I haven’t seen the same look on your face?

The closest I’ve ever been to the Garden of Eden is the genesis on the battlefield when the shrapnel’s still falling like hail on a tin roof. You look at me with those blue eyes all hot and electric in your face, blood on your cheek, soot smudged over your nose. Bone of my bones. Were you taken from my rib? You must have b...

it won’t be like what you imagined. maybe you get the road trip to the beach with coffee in your hand and the radio playing, maybe you don’t. but happy shows up. it’s in a 2 AM game of jenga with your new college friends. it’s curling up for another marathon of netflix. it’s meeting the person who will be your best man at the wedding. it’s 4:45pm in the library when the girl in the study coral across from you quietly whispers “i’m going to set everything on fire” and then turns to you and asks if you wanna take a break for dinner (say yes, she’s very nice and you both need a moment away from the stress). it’s the mornings they have omelettes and in good books and in a puddle that looks cool. it’s sometimes picturesque, but more often it’s full-belly laughter at stupid things on the floor of your friend’s house while in the background someone is debating the best...

What do you say, after this I’ll take you someplace nice, and I’m not talking about one of the dance halls you hate so bad either. It’s so God damn cold in Brooklyn your lungs make a louder racket than our broken radiator and Mister Eli’s mangy cat combined, and then here mud sucks at our shoes and gets under my fingernails and I swear to God that I haven’t felt warm in half a year. Neither have you, no matter how hard you pretend otherwise.

So if we ever get out of this frozen wet hell we’re going out to the Grand Canyon. I tell you, I dream of the Grand Canyon. We’ll be there at night, just you and me, and throw rocks off the edge to hear them make land a thousand miles down, thunking like fat little raindrops into a puddle. That’s all I want to do anymore. Lay on the baked red ground next to you until my bones heat up. Warm again. Warm...

Thank you Debra, thank you BET. Thank you Nate Parker and Debbie Allen for participating in that. Before we get into it, I just want to say, you know, I brought my parents out. I just want to thank them for being here, for teaching me to focus on comprehension over career — they made sure I learned what the schools were afraid to teach us. And also I thank my amazing wife for changing my life.

Now — this award, this is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country, the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. All right? It’s kind of basic mathematics.

The more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize.

the thing is, somebody cares. i know your best friend seems really busy all the time and is shit at texting but she still loves you and she talks to you more than she talks to anyone else and you’re the only breath of calm she has on this planet. the boy in your science class loves seeing what music you’re listening to on your headphones - he has the same taste and wishes he had the nerve to ask you about it. your english teacher loves the insight you have on your papers. somebody cares. the person who lives down the street from you notices when you are sick because they don’t see you stomping your way to the schoolbus - it’s how they know it’s time to get their breakfast ready. somebody is looking for you at the party, even if they don’t know they’re really looking for you - but when you don’t show up, some part of them is disappointed. somebody is looking for you in the l...

…I was born in 1990 and I was sort of raised in America when it was a cult of self-expression, and I was just taught, you know, express myself and have things to say and everyone will care about them. And I think everyone was taught that and must of us found out that no one gives a shit what we think. So we flock to performers by the thousands ‘cause we’re the few that found an audience, and then I’m supposed to get up here and say “follow your dreams,” as if this was a meritocracy? It is not, okay? I had a privileged life and I got lucky and I’m unhappy. They say it’s…it’s like…the ‘me’ generation. It’s not. The arrogance is taught or it was cultivated. It’s self-conscious. That’s what it is, it’s conscious of self. Social media is just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said: “here, perform everything, to each...

“And sometimes you held somebody’s hand just to prove that you were still alive, and that another human being was there to testify to that fact.”

- Rainbow Rowell

‘Aren’t you afraid of my darkness, my dear?’ Hades asked with mischief in his eyes.

‘No,‘ Persephone replied, ‘You haven’t even seen mine yet.’

“You care,” he suddenly says, quiet and pleased in the bitter air.

Louis blinks, confused. “Sorry?”

“You care about me,” Harry clarifies, every word said with a tiny smile that packs a thousand punches to the throat. “You don’t want me to smoke because you’re worried.”

Oh jesus.

“Alright, alright, calm down now, pup,” Louis bristles, suddenly self-conscious and too warm.

But Harry’s smiling up at the stars, swallowing them up in his eyes. “I’m just saying,” he comments idly.

“Yeah, well,” Louis gruffs, taking another drag. He exhales, watches the smoke pool out in a stream as he resists rolling his eyes, tries to remain aloof. “Don’t write a poem about it, or anything.”

Harry merely smiles in response, still st...

On April 20, 1970, the poet Paul Celan left his home in Paris, walked to a bridge over the River Seine, and jumped to his death. He left a biography of Hölderlin open on his desk, with the following words underlined: Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart. The sentence does not end there. Celan chose not to underline the rest: but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously.

— Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts: a Memoir

A poet told me she wouldn’t be able to translate one of the lines from my poem: ‘I love you in this city,’ and make it sound right. She said it wouldn’t sound sincere. I didn’t tell her, the person I wrote it for didn’t think so either. I would have tried to make it sound like a joke. She wasn’t getting my jokes. Instead she wrote one of my other lines on the wall: What else would it mean to be human if not a lost thing. I could have fell for her but I didn’t. Maybe when we say love, we mean a safe place to fall apart.

— Tonight’s Cantab feature is Kundiman fellow and Write Bloody author Jason Bayani! This is from his poem “Kein/Muenchen,” published in Muzzle as part of their 30 Poets in Their 30s feature.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopeless...

"Notice, it’s everywhere. Look, you’ll find. We are surrounded by the simplest displays of stunning beauty, momentary examples of still life paintings made real, we must seek them, we must pay attention before they flee. They will wait, I promise, but only for a breath or two. Only."

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

I will take the sun in my mouth

and leap into the ripe air

Alive

with closed eyes

to dash against darkness

in the sleeping curves of my body

Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery

with chasteness of sea-girls

Will i complete the mystery

of my flesh

I will rise

After a thousand years lipping flowers

And set my teeth in the silver of the moon.

“Addiction is tricky.

For example: a man who quit smoking for 11 years spent 15 seconds in an elevator with a man smoking a cigarette. He gave in.

What I’m trying to say is I think I love you again.”

"Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin?

Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea?

And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me —

how would you explain the miracle of my life to me?

See, I wanna know if you believe in any god

or if you believe in many gods

or better yet

what gods believe in you.

And for all the times that you’ve knelt before the temple of yourself,

have the prayers you asked come true?

And if they didn’t, did you feel denied?

And if you felt denied,

denied by who?

I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror

"The only difference between me and other people was that I’ve always demanded more from the sunset."

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly in the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.’

Ever since I was a child, it has been my tendency to create around me a fictitious world, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances that never existed. (It can’t be sure, of course, if they really never existed, or if it’s me who doesn’t exist. In this matter, as in any other, we shouldn’t be dogmatic.) Ever since I’ve known myself as ‘me’, I can remember envisioning the shape, motions, character and life story of various unreal figures who were as visible and as close to me as the manifestations of what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life. This tendency, which goes back as far as I can remember being an I, has always accompanied me, changing somewhat the music it enchants me with, but never the way in which it enchants me.

— Fernando Pessoa

“We’re all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.”

-Tim, About Time

"Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen."

Anne Lamott

“One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.”

“This is why it hurts the way it hurts. You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache. You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much.”

― pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You and Only You

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”

― Anthony Doerr, All the Lights We Cannot See

"I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish."

"E eu, no que acreditava? Talvez na beleza, a única coisa que me pôs de joelhos no mundo. À minha maneira, eu seguia esse tipo de religião."

Eu Receberia as Piores Notícias de Seus Lindos Lábios, de Marçal Aquino

"I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beards.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and I forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel."

All The Lights We Cannot See

"Estou a falar, mas no fundo continuo em silêncio."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdIZGN-z...

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you ...

• "If I could fly, I'd be coming right back home to you. I think I might give up everything, just ask me to."
• "I leave my heart open but it stays right here empty for days."
• "Written on these walls are the colors that I can't change. Leave my heart open, but it stays right here in its cage."
• "We made a fire, went down in the flames. We sailed an ocean, and drowned in the waves. Built a cathedral, but we never prayed."
• "I've got scars, even though they can't always be seen. And pain gets hard, but now you're here and I don't feel a thing."
• "My heart's already breaking, baby, go on, twist the knife."
• "So long I've been waiting to let go of myself and feel alive. So many nights I thought it over, told myself I kind of liked her, but there was something missing in...

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. ― Leonard Cohen

"Powerful women do not have to act masculine or cold in order to get things done. Powerful women can be huggers who name their dog Lamby and make flower crowns in their free time."

- Taylor Swift

"O que acontece é que, quando estou com você, eu me perdoo por todas as lutas que a vida venceu por pontos, e me esqueço completamente que gente como eu, no fim, acaba saindo mais cedo de bares, de brigas e de amores para não pagar a conta."

- Eu Receberia As Piores Notícias dos Seus Lindos Lábios, de Marçal Aquino

"Ballet class with pin-thin shaking hands and bathrooms that smelt like a bad dream. A teacher who said, “Don’t eat unless you faint, darlings.” You get used to cigarettes in the hands of young girls. You get used to the backstage addictions of “only nine hundred more crunches to go.” You get used to seeing this stuff until one day someone asks you why you know all the calories in a grapenut.

The television saying, “Lose weight, feel great.”. The television saying, “Girls mean nothing.”; The television saying, “If you’re not pretty, you’re not worth discussing.”. The television saying, “If you’re pretty, your personality is awful.”. The television saying, “Spend your money.”

My father telling me: there’s nothing wrong with this system.”

“I used to put love on a checklist. I wanted to fall in love the way they did in the movies. But I think I knew I fell in love with you when I stopped counting. When I threw the list out. When I realized that I didn’t want to fall in love the way they did in the movies, because we were falling in love better than they ever could. It wasn’t love built for a big screen. It was love that could only fit in your arms. It was ours.”

"Today, the average high school student has the same anxiety levels as the average 1950’s psychiatric patient. We know the Pythagorean theorem by heart, but short-circuit when asked “How are you?”. We don’t know. We don’t know. That wasn’t on the study guide. We usually know the answer, but rarely know ourselves.”

"No contexto de um discurso feminista materialista, nós sabemos que os corpos importam. Mas também sabemos que nossos corpos não são nosso destino. Somos mais que nossos corpos. É esse conceito profundamente espiritual que fez minhas/meus ancestrais escravizados passar pelo horror daquela experiência, sabendo que somos mais que nossos corpos, achando um espaço para transcender essa materialidade em que vivemos. Mas como ferramenta libertadora é importante que nós, pessoas negras, retomemos nossos corpos, historicamente vendidos, estuprados, linchados, freqüentemente depreciados como não-belos e até mesmo selvagens. Só que é importante que, ao retomarmos nossos corpos, não compremos a mitologia racializada acerca deles." - Laverne Cox

"It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world."

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free.

Blackbird fly, blackbird fly into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

"At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.” In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over. Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms. When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like...

"Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive." Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

"Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” ― Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

“somewhere there is a women in China holding a black umbrella so she won’t taste the salt of the rain when the sky begins to weep, there is a 17 year old girl who smells like pomegranates and has summer air tight on her naked skin, wrapping around her scars like veins in a bloody garden, who won’t make it past tomorrow,

there is a young man, who buys yellow flowers for the woman in apartment 84B, who learned braille when he realized she couldn’t read his poetry about her white neck and mint eyes

there are people watching films, making love for the first time, opening mail with the heading of ‘i miss you’, cooking noodles with organic spices and red sauces, buying lemon detergent, ignoring ‘do not smoke’ signs, painting murals of his lips in abandoned warehouses, chewing the words ‘i love you’ over and over again, swallowing phone numbers and forg...

"You know, Ellen, a kind word can move mountains and change lives. But for those times when they've escaped you, when the right thing wasn't said, or the time wasn't right to say it, kind thoughts can do the same.

And better, thoughts have a way of lingering, seeking, and finding their intended beneficiary, unfettered by time and space. So it's never too late to think 'em, nor are you ever too far away.

Just a little something a tree once told me, The Universe"

"Porque quando chega a primavera, a neve vai derretendo floco a floco. E talvez eu tivesse simplesmente testemunhado o primeiro floco que se derretia." - O Caçador de Pipas

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

• “Naw, Jem. I think that there is just one kind of folks. Folks." Jem turned and punched his pillow. When he settled back his face was cloudy. He was going in to one of his declines, and I grew wary. His brows came together; his mouth became a thin line. He was silent for a while. "That is what I thought, too," he said at last, "when I was your age. If there is just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go ut of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I am beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley stayed shut up in the house all this time...it's because he wants to stay inside.”
• “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the...

"Quer dizer, nós ganhamos a Segunda Guerra Mundial, certo? E, no entanto, todos esses adultos - filhos, filhas e netos de nossos heróis da Segunda Guerra - continuam a entrar em trens da morte metafóricos, mesmo tendo derrotado os nazifacistas há muito tempo. Portanto, cada americano é livre para fazer o que quiser aqui neste grande país supostamente livre. Por que não usam sua liberdade para buscar a felicidade?" - Perdão, Leonard Peacock, de Matthew Quick

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When someone loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept...

“As the preacher spoke, he waited for the warmth of God to draw itself over him like a bath. He even sang, loudly, hoping to catch some of Him in his mouth. The stained glass reminded him of the colorful cereal he ate as a child. The tops of the ladies’ hats made him feel as if he was sitting in the middle of an English garden. He closed his eyes and dreamed he was a butterfly. He was flying in the Garden of Eden. God was posing for the Sistine Chapel and let him land on His pointer finger and said, “You are the prettiest butterfly I’ve ever seen.” His voice was higher than he had expected and he noticed He had long blond hair and breasts and, suddenly, She was guiding him away from the garden, away from the pews, into a field of blueish grass. She stopped in front of a low-hanging cloud. “Kneel,” She said, and he bent his four knees, because he was no longer a butterfly but ...

"Era uma pessoa igual a cem mil outras pessoas. Mas eu fiz dela um amigo, e agora ela é única no mundo."

- O Pequeno Príncipe

"And even if we never talk again, please remember that I'm forever changed by who you are and what you meant to me." - Chasing Amy

“Everything you can imagine is real.” ― Pablo Picasso

“I’m creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But it’s labor pain: something is being born that is.”

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh a...

"I will love you if I see you every day, and I will love you if I never see you again."

• Hoseok

"You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold on to that? And I said,

Where I can put it down?"

• Jungkook

"Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it."

• Seokjin, Jimin

"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed."

• BTS

"I love you. I say your name all the time when you're not around just to put more of you in the world."

"He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his hand."

- Richard Siken

"To love even our own lack of love and, in our parched state, to love the implitic water, the implied kiss, the infinite thirst."

Que pode uma criatura senão,

entre criaturas, amar?

amar e esquecer, amar e malamar,

amar, desamar, amar?

sempre, e até de olhos vidrados, amar?

Que pode, pergunto, o ser amoroso,

sozinho, em rotação universal,

senão rodar também, e amar?

amar o que o mar traz à praia,

o que ele sepulta, e o que, na brisa marinha,

é sal, ou precisão de amor, ou simples ânsia?

Amar solenemente as palmas do deserto,

o que é entrega ou adoração expectante,

e amar o inóspito, o cru,

um vaso sem flor, um chão de ferro,

"I healed and realized that even when the love I give isn’t reciprocated, it doesn't mean that I' am less. I have so much love to give, I have so much of it in me. I don’t need another person to prove that I am loved, or that I can love. I guess that’s what you call hope. I guess that’s what it means to reach beyond ourselves; realizing that love is an endless river flowing through us but we are so busy staring into the sun begging for requital to notice.”

“Each time Desire looked towards Love,

hoping to find a witness,

Guilt shouted louder.“

James Baldwin, Guilt, Desire and Love

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

• "And if you wanted me, you really should've showed, and if you never bleed, you're never gonna grow, and it's alright now. But we were something, don't you think so?"
• "But we were something, don't you think so? Roaring twenties, tossing pennies in the pool. And if my wishes came true, it would've been you."
• "Persist and resist the temptation to ask you: if one thing had been different, would everything be different today?"
• "Rosé flowing with your chosen family, and it would've been sweet if it could've been me."
• "In my defense, I have none, for never leaving well enough alone."
• "In my defense, I have none, for digging up the grave another time. But it would've been fun if you would've been the one."

"Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive."

- The Tree of Life (2011)

• "I thought that I was dreaming when you said you loved me."
• "You're the only friend I need, sharing beds like little kids, laughing 'til our ribs get tough. But that will never be enough."
• "We're reeling through the midnight streets, and I've never felt more alone. It feels so scary, getting old."
• "Baby, be the class clown, I'll be the beauty queen in tears. It's a new art form showing people how little we care."
• "I hate the headlines and the weather. I'm nineteen and I'm on fire, but when we're dancing, I'm alright. It's just another graceless night."
• "This is the start of how it all ever ends. They used to shout my name, now they whisper it."
• "When you see me, will you say I've changed? I ride the subway, read the signs, I ...

''you are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while''

- Eckhart Tolle

“It's funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that's why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It's not the pain they're getting over, it's the love.”

"You imagine a world where the two of you can go out to dinner together on a saturday night and no one thinks twice about it. It makes you want to cry, the simplicity of it, the smallness of it."

“The sun still, surprisingly, came up and shone down onto the cold, metal leftovers. No loud noises. No screams. No breaking glass. Just silence and sunshine. You would be forgiven for thinking that this all happened on another planet. It didn’t.”

- pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“Because we all need to believe in movies, sometimes.”

- pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold onto the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“O que as pessoas mais desejam é alguém que as escute de maneira calma e tranquila. Em silêncio. Sem dar conselhos. Sem que digam: “Se eu fosse você”. A gente ama não é a pessoa que fala bonito. É a pessoa que escuta bonito. A fala só é bonita quando ela nasce de uma longa e silenciosa escuta. É na escuta que o amor começa. E é na não-escuta que ele termina. Não aprendi isso nos livros. Aprendi prestando atenção.”

— Rubem Alves

“I belong to a very conservative family, so I’ve been dealing with a lot of permission issues. There are a lot of boundaries on me. Most of the women in my family are housewives, and my father would prefer me to become a housewife as well. But I’ve been working so hard in school. I’m studying all the freaking time. These exams are so tough. I don’t want all this hard work to be wasted. I want to be a businesswoman. My mother is a housewife. She needs to ask my father for everything. When he’s not around, she tells me: ‘Do exactly what you want to do.’”

(Karachi, Pakistan)

“I took him to see Brokeback Mountain when it came out. I thought I was challenging him with the choice. But at the end of the film, he turned to me and said: ‘That’s me.’ We’d been married for thirty years. Our kids were still young. I didn’t know what to do. Do I leave? Do I stay? We were ex-pats in another country at the time, so we were all alone. I had nobody to talk to. We went to a therapist to see if it was possible to stay together, and she told us: ‘I’ve seen it work. But only if one person is very discrete and the other is very tolerant.’ So I agreed to try. It’s been ten years. It’s been exhausting in a lot of ways. I asked too many questions at first. I made myself miserable. Now I give him a lot of space. And I get a lot of space in return. I’ve been traveling alone for about two months now. I know what’s going on back home but I don’t ask about it...

“Obama had been president for six days. The old timers in the twelve-step program tell you to associate the memory with something, so that’s how I remember it. The weather was just like this, even though it was November. It was sixtyish degrees. I was sitting on a stoop, having my morning beer and cigarette, and feeling disgusted with myself. I was wheezing so bad that it felt like I’d swallowed a whistle. And I had this moment of clarity. I knew I was done. So I took a couple more swigs, threw the pack of Newports into traffic, and walked over to Project Renewal on 3rd Street. I’ll be ten years sober if I can make it until November 10th. That was my day. And it still is my day. Even if I fail, I’ll remember that on that day I succeeded. And if I did it then, I can do it again.”

"I know what you mean about wishing somebody wasn't there, though. It's just usually it's myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this: I have never been anywhere that I haven't been. I've never had a kiss when I wasn't one of the kissers. Y'know, I've never, um, gone to the movies, when I wasn't there in the audience. I've never been out bowling, if I wasn't there, y'know, making some stupid joke. I think that's why so many people hate themselves. Seriously, it's just they are sick to death of being around themselves."

“Last week I was picking through the trash, looking for bottles and cans to recycle, and my social worker walked by with her family. She walked just a few feet from me. And I know she saw me. But she didn’t say a thing. Not even ‘hello.’ I asked her about it during our next meeting, and at first she denied seeing me. But then she told me that she had been in her ‘private space.’ That really put a stake in my heart. Why can’t you say ‘hello’ to me in your private space? So I’m writing her a letter. I’m using a dictionary because I want the words to be perfect. If you mess up your words, then it’s easy for people to ignore what you’re trying to say. And I want to be sure she knows exactly how it made me feel.”

"Any of you people ever loved somebody? Sometimes it comes very quickly, very easily, as easy as the way a beautiful English girl’s hair falls across her shoulder. Sometimes it disappears just as quick. You wake up one morning, the butterflies stop fluttering. But you want it back and you wanna fight for it, you wanna breathe that fire again, so you call for it. You call out."

- Brandon Flowers, For Reasons Unknown speech, live at the Royal Albert Hall

“We always say we are beneath the stars. We aren't, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are whos, other animals are that—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.”

― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

Rejoice! Our times are intolerable.

Take courage, for the worst is a harbinger of the best. Only dire circumstance can precipitate the overthrow of oppressors. The old and corrupt must be laid to waste before the just can triumph. Contradiction will be heightened. The reckoning will be hastened by the staging of seed disturbances.

The apocalypse will blossom.

"I am thankful for my family. I'm thankful that we're all safe and there's no one in the world that I'd rather be too hot or too cold with."

William: Roll all the windows down, Randall, crank up the music, grow out that fro. Let someone else make your bed.

Randall: I like makin' my damn bed, old man.

William: Then you make it. You deserve it. You deserve the beautiful life you made. You deserve everything, Randall. My beautiful boy. My son. I haven't had a happy life. Bad breaks. Bad choices. A life of almosts and could haves. Some would call it sad, but I don't, cause the two best things in my life were the person in the very beginning and the person at the very end and that's a pretty good thing to be able to say, I think.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

~ Anne Lamott

"Ouça, Virgínia, é preciso amar o inútil. Criar pombos sem pensar em comê-los, plantar roseiras sem pensar em colher rosas, escrever sem pensar em publicar, fazer coisas assim sem esperar nada em troca. A distância mais curta entre dois pontos pode ser a linha reta, mas é nos caminhos curvos que se encontram as melhores coisas. A música, este céu que nem promete chuva, aquela estrelinha que está nascendo ali... está vendo aquela estrelinha? Há milênios não tem feito nada, não guiou os Reis Magos, nem os pastores, nem os marinheiros perdidos... Não faz nada. Apenas brilha. Ninguém repara nela porque é uma estrela inútil. Pois é preciso amar o inútil, porque no inútil está a Beleza. No inútil está Deus."

"Here's something I've learned about people.

We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us. We know our friend in a certain light, but we don't know them the way their lover does. Just the way their lover will never know them the same way that you do as their friend. Their mother knows them differently than their roommate, who knows them differently than their colleague. Their secret admirer looks at them and sees an elaborate sunset of brilliant color and dimension and spirit and pricelessness. And yet, a stranger will pass that person and see a faceless member of the crowd, nothing more. We may hear rumors about a person and believe those things to be true. We may one day meet that person and feel foolish for believing baseless gossip.

This is the first generation that will be...

What did mean to be a slave? It is hard to imagine today. We think of oppression beyond all conception: cruelty, degradation, whipping and starvation, the absolute negation of human rights; or, the contrary, we may think of the ordinary worker the world over today, slaving ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled by his physical necessities to do this and not do that, curtailed in his movements and his possibilities; and we say, here, too, is a slave called a “free worker”, and slavery is merely a matter of name.

But there was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from what we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submerge...

I said remember this moment

In the back of my mind

The time we stood with our shaking hands

The crowds in stands went wild

We were the kings and the queens

And they read off our names

The night you danced like you knew our lives

Would never be the same

You held your head like a hero

On a history book page

It was the end of a decade

But the start of an age

Long live the walls we crashed through

All the kingdom lights shined just for me and you

I was screaming, "long live all the magic we made"

And bring on all the pretenders

One day we will be remembered

I said remember this feeling

I passed the pictures around

"Por favor, aprecie cada dia que você está vivo. Deixe todos nós apreciarmos a paz que temos agora."

"A vida é um tesouro curioso."

As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.

— Ram Dass

• "Why did you call me?" "I told you, this dude came in, he played this song."
• "I don't gamble, but if I did I would bet on us."
• "Out of all those kinds of people, you got a face with a view."
• "I got a letter on a lonesome day, it was from her ship a-sailing, saying I don't know when I'll be coming back again; it depends on how I'm feeling."
• "I must admit it, that I would marry you in an instant. Damn your wife, I'd be your mistress just to have you around. But I was late for this, late for that, late for the love of my life. And when I die alone, when I die alone, when I die I'll be on time."
• "The loneliest that I ever get is when I lose her voice inside the wind."
• "I couldn't know what's in your mind, but I saw the pictures, you're looking fine....

"I'm afraid John, I can't congratulate you. All emotions and, in particular, love, stand opposed to the pure cold reason I hold above all things. A wedding is, in my considered opinion, nothing short of a celebration of all that is false and specious and irrational and sentimental in this ailing and morally compromised world. Today we honor the death watch people, that is the doom of our society and, in time one feels certain, our entire species. If I burden myself with a little help mate during my adventures it is not out of sentiment or caprice, it is that he has many fine qualities of his own that he has overlooked in his obsession with me. Indeed any reputation I have for mental acuity and sharpness comes in truth from the extraordinary contrast John so selflessly provides. It is a fact I believe brides tend to favor exceptionally plain bridesmaids for their big day. There is a certain...

I never believed in soulmates. My breathing, my heartbeat, my body, my being wasn’t made for you, and neither yours for me. But whenever someone asks me, how long we’ve been together or how long I’ve known you, without any hesitation my answer is “always.”

I refuse to believe the first time that our bodies collided was in this world. We met eons over. Far before the heavenly bodies lit up the night sky and before my bones came to rest in this body of mine. This love, this thing, this feeling I have for you, it’s always been here.

— This Love, This Thing, by Nicole Moon

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

"A vida é um enorme dia único."

"Did you say it? 'I love you. I don't ever wanna live without you. You changed my life.' Did you say it? Make a plan. Set a goal. Work toward it. But every now and then look around. Drink it in. 'Cause this is it. It might all be gone tomorrow."

"So, I painted this because I felt like the play was about life, you know, and life is full of colour and we should get to come along and we add our own colour to the painting, you know. And even though it's not very big, the painting, it sort have to figure that it goes on forever, you know, in each direction, so loke to infinity, you know, 'cause that's kinda like life. It was really crazy, if you think about it, isn't it, that a hundred years ago some guy that I never met came to this country with a suitcase. He has a son, who has a son, who has me. So, at first when I was painting it, I was thinking, you know that maybe up here that was that guy's part of the painting, and then, you know, down here that's my part of the painting. And then I started to think what if we're all in the painting everywhere. What if we were in the painting before we were born, what if we're in it after we di...

"And I realized saying there’s a rainbow after the rain isn’t entirely true. Because that day I was sad and it was raining. But there was no rainbow afterwards. There was a sunset though. And it was so, so damn beautiful."

but, i am not all guilty.

nor can i be all

sea. this is just

a bone song.

— francine j. harris, from “sift,” Allegiance

September, 1951

My greatest trouble, arising from my basic and egoistic self-love, is jealousy. I am jealous of men—a dangerous and subtle envy which can corrode, I imagine, any relationship. It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening. I envy the man his physical freedom to lead a double life—his career, and his sexual and family life. I can pretend to forget my envy; no matter, it is there, insidious, malignant, latent.

…

At any rate, I admit that I am not strong enough, or rich enough, or independent enough to live up in actual to my ideal standards. You ask me, what are those ideal standards? Good for you. The only escape (do I sound Freudian?) from the present set up as I see it, is in the exercise of a phase of life inviolate and separate f...

• "There's something warm in everything."
• "I've been a victim of a selfish kind of love. It's time that I realize that there are some with no home, not a nickel to loan. Could it be really me, pretending that they're not alone?"
• "Something here's trying to pollute my brain. I'm buried alive in the blues."
• "If I had vision through time like the way I can see what's behind, would I see me hopes and dreams?"
• "And my thoughts are turning backwards, and I'm picking at the pieces of a world that keeps turning the screws in my mind."
• "I kissed her face and kissed her head and dreamed of all the different ways I had to make her glow."
• "Daylight licked me into shape. I must have been asleep for days, and moving lips to breathe her name, I opened up my eyes....

There is a rebel in me – the Shadow-Beast. It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities. It refuses to take orders from my conscious will, it threatens the sovereignty of my rulership. It is that part of me that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitations on my time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet. Bolts.

— Gloria Anzaldúa, from “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan,” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Honestly, after getting past a lot of internalized misogyny, I aim to be exactly the kind of girl society had demonized.

The girly girl. I want unapologetically pink stuff, and flavored coffee, and pop music, and sunglasses, and cute clothes, and perfect nails, and lipstick, and selfies.

The tough girl. I want the black clothes, the sharp smile, the silver tongue, the fearless laugh, the no bullshit attitude.

The smart girl. I want to learn everything that makes me curious, I want to enjoy my classes without being mocked, I want a book, a cup of tea, a comfy sweater, a night in at home.

The party girl. I want the short dresses, the girly named drinks, the tall high-heels, the loud music, the long nights.

The ambitious girl. I want full agendas, and the power walk through the hallways, ...

Sedienta como el mar y como el mar ahogada

de agua salobre y honda

vengo desde el abismo hasta mis labios

que son como una torpe tentativa de playa,

como arena rendida

llorando por la fuga de las olas.

Thirsty as the sea and like the sea drowned

with salt water and deep

I come from the abyss to my own lips,

which are a clumsy attempt at a beach,

like exhausted sand

weeping for the waves’ retreat.

— Rosario Castellanos, from The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry; “Mur de Lamentaciones” (tr. Magda Bogin)

"You have a voice. Use it. Speak up. Raise your hands. Shout your answers. Make yourself heard. Whatever it takes, just find your voice. And when you do, fill the damn silence."

- Meredith Grey

"Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He’s very dreamy, but he’s not the sun. You are."

— Christina Yang

I couldn’t write a word about it, although I died in my head.

— Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

“We’re the worst terrorists in the world and it was a long time coming. This entire country was built on the slaughter of innocents. And we got what we deserved. Just look at the history of US involvement in the Middle East. All those countries are artificial. We created those countries like plastic after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And the only way to rule a plastic country is with a dictator. Assad, Hussein, the Shah—we propped them all up. Decades of torture, murder, and oppression. We sponsored it. So I say it whenever I can. I’ve had people threaten to kill me. I’ve had people threaten to rape my children. But I’ll keep saying it. You can call me a monster. I think the people in those towers died as representatives for the rest of us for our crimes against humanity. Not only do I think that 9/11 was deserved. I think it was one of the greatest events in human history.“...

You remember staying up late reading Dracula out loud to each other under the covers, back when your ma was still alive? And we were havin the best time, scaring ourselves like a couple of idiots, until all of a sudden a police siren started up outside and we both screamed fit to wake the people in West Virginia. Then your ma came flying down the hall with a bread knife of all things at the ready, and she made us turn out the lights. So we did, and then of course I tried to act all tough, but I slept next to you that night anyway. Funny, I guess. Turns out that you’re still my favorite hiding place. Funny, too: turns out there are scarier things in the dark than vampires.

Tell you something. Tell you another secret, because this one, this one I won’t ever tell, not to God, not to a priest, and sure as hell not to you. In that base we burned the bodies in a furnace. I hadn’...

Here’s a story your mama told me.

When she came over on the boat she kept getting sick and she couldn’t figure out why. Eventually this lady came up to see if she was fine, and she asked her, when are you due? And your ma said, no, I’m only seasick.

I’m supposed to take the rest of this story to the grave, but I doubt anyone will care to find these anyway.

So it turned out the woman from the Old Country was right, and your ma cried herself sick because she was so scared and alone. You see now why I was supposed to take this one to the grave? She asks the woman, the hell will I do? I don’t have any money and nobody on God’s green Earth will hire an Irish girl fresh off the ship, especially when she’s in a family way. Now the woman, she was feeling terrible about this, terrible for this young girl who had nowhere else to turn. And the ...

What I wouldn’t God damn give, Bucky finally manages, for you to have been this healthy three years ago, that winter when you almost died on me in the middle of the night from that rattle in your chest. I spent one month scared as hell that you were going to stop breathing and then two weeks worrying that the next time you coughed there’d be blood in your hand, and you’d be gone from me just like that, same way as your mama before you, God rest her soul. I didn’t think I could stand it, having to bury you. Even now I’d rather eat my own gun than see you dead.

Bucky’s hands don’t shake when he’s scared or nervous anymore; he wouldn’t be the best sniper in the US Army if they did. It’s been beaten out of him well and good. But he feels something burning and panicked rush through him all the same as the truth stares back at him from t...

They fucked me up, but I don’t ever wanna tell you just how bad. I won’t even now, don’t even want to think those things in your direction. But I will tell you — mostly because God willing you’ll never see these — I will tell you that when you first came for me I thought, hand to the Lord, that I was finally dead. And then I figured it was just another trick. They did that, made me think you were there. They’d shoot me up with something, and after I felt it slide through my veins under my skin I would see you, or I’d hear you, and I’d say your name the way I used to. You know what I mean — that nickname you hated, the one I still sometimes say just to rile you up because you’re amazing when I piss you off, your face all red like that, something about the fact that I can get your heart going.

But that name, I’d say it over and over...

• "Laugh until we see the light, but the light was already there."
• "Can’t face heaven all heavenfaced."
• "I am secretly in love with everyone that I grew up with."
• "I sincerely tried to love it. Wish that I could rise above it."
• "When I walk into a room, I do not light it up. Fuck."
• "Jennifer, you are not the only reason my head is boiling and my hands are freezing."
• "You didn't see me, I was falling apart. I was a television version of a person with a broken heart."
• "You don't mind seeing yourself in a picture as long as you look far away."
• "If I get a little prettier can I be your baby?"
• "And if I try my hardest, would you look my way?"

Activists, progressive and revolutionary alike, will always respond to our critique of the social order with a demand that we articulate some sort of alternative. Let us say once and for all that we have none to offer. Faced with the system’s seamless integration of all positive projects into itself, we can’t afford to affirm or posit any more alternatives for it to consume. Rather we must realize that our task is infinite, not because we have so much to build but because we have an entire world to destroy. Our daily life is so saturated and structured by capital that it is impossible to imagine a life worth living, except one of revolt.

—

the anti-social turn, in baedan: journal of queer nihilism

Não vá deixar que perca o pouco que te prende aqui dentro.

this is the monologue which opened the gybe! live show at the royal festival hall, london, on april 3rd 2000.

there is a devil in this world and no angel will save us our relations are sickened and damaged as this upside down world they’re turning our neighbourhoods into disneylands they’re building more prisons and doubling their patrols at the same time miss celine dion sings love songs while our cities burn in these times, when everything is denied us anything is possible but everyday stubborn clumsy beautiful ideas rot on the withering vine all dreams fall down failure leads to irony, and irony smothers us with all the pastel colours of the newest retail superstores we call for an end to this state of affairs long live a little bit of autonomy long live all quiet roof easels a sort of culture can be built here all sorts of things can happen when and if we finally begin...

“(…) you are whatever a moon has always meant / and whatever a sun will always sing”

- e.e. cummings, [I carry your heart with me (i carry it in]

"How can you call Jesus a white man when he died the blackest way? With his hands up. His mother watching, crying."

- Crystal Valentine, “And the News Reporter Says Jesus Is White"

I think kissing is the most pure and raw form of physical contact there could ever be. Sex is intimate, sure, but you can have sex with anyone. A kiss though, my god. A kiss can change your world. A small touch between two pairs of lips can blow your mind. Whether it be short and sweet, or long and intense. And when you find someone that looks at you like you’re more beautiful than a blossoming rose; you never want to feel another’s lips against yours ever again.

— The Purity of a Kiss

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

— Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

The hole in my heart is so big,

room enough for the sky to pass through

holding Jupiter’s hand.

I can fill it with a mountain.

I can fill it with a name.

— Aracelis Girmay, from “The Piano,” Teeth

Soulmates aren’t rare, they aren’t, you’ll meet a thousand soulmates, just as you’ll live a thousand lives.

North Stars though, they are. By chance you’ll meet someone who encompass the way home. Someone who is home. And knowing them is like being found with never knowing you were lost.

And you will love them. God, you will love them as they are because they are yours. They exist beneath your skin, in your veins, to your bones. They were written in some far off past life.

There is no force that is more than they are.

You are born half in love with them, and to have them, to be theirs, is like nothing else. Nothing would dare to be.

I exist. It’s sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you’d think it floated all by itself. It stirs.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, from Nausea

"two girls kissing in paris, ignoring the politics in this

a film about two girls who are not depressed because they are gay

a film about two girls who are not dead because they are gay

they give each other flowers

there is no grave in this

no scene in which the heartbroken walk back down the street, away from the camera

the end is not elegy

the end is not blue

running cornflower

fistfuls of cerulean

cold sky

they know how to love each other

there is no choreographed sex

no brief infinite tenderness

they learn how to use their mouths

a folding of soft

no crash

no broken windshield bodies

• "He's always looking down. Louis always wants him to look up. So the sky and the sun and the moon and the stars can see him and realize why they just don't compare."
• "I know you can't, but I wish you would."
• "I don't know, I don't care, all I know is you can take me there."
• "My soul slides away. "But don't look back in anger, don't look back in anger", I heard you say, "at least not today."
• "Some might say they don't believe in heaven; go and tell it to the man who lives in hell."
• "You want to be alone when we could be alive instead."
• "I don't know what it is that makes me feel alive. I don't know how to wake the things that sleep inside. I only wanna see the light that shines behind your eyes."

"You were never meant to fall in love. Your story ends in tears or it ends in death. Jack Twist was bludgeoned to death with a tire iron and Ennis Del Mar was left alone in his closet to dance with an empty shirt. Alby Grant found Dale Tomasson swinging by a noose in the apartment that had been their safehouse, their respite, and he sank to his knees and cradled Dale’s bare feet and he cried. The Motion Picture Association of America axed Lana Tisdel and Brandon Teena’s sex scenes, but they didn’t have a problem with the extended shot of Lana cradling Brandon’s corpse in her fragile arms and falling asleep next to his body.

Love and intimacy are ours only in death, or so it would seem. I don’t want to die. Isn’t that a very human experience? Not wanting to die? When does anyone who looks like me get to grow old and raise grandchildren and hold her wife’s hand ...

"If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now, for wheat is wheat, even if people think it's grass in the beginning." - Vincent Van Gogh

"You are cruel for making everything else seem dull. You have shown me color in a world of gray, and you are cruel for you take the color with you every moment that you’re not beside me.

You are cruel because I will gladly suffer until the world has returned."

slowly,

learn to outgrow

some souls,

even your old self.

— Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Poem 6: Misandry (from Acts 27:41) — “Dangerous men should be broken.”

"I’ve been acting all along and people still think I’m happy. At this point I’m starting to think that either I’m really good at acting or people only see what’s easier for them."

- Hedonist Poet

eu olho pra você e me dá vontade de chorar

só porque você não pode sair do teu corpo e ver como a sua pele reflete a luz

tão linda linda linda

do meu ângulo

"In every city, every building has a room with corners that are completely familiar to the people inside it. And if you think about it like that, nothing is strange at all.

What might be unthinkable for you, might be everyday, for me."

“Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?” “You will tell us, I am sure.” “It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?” Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.”

― Anthony Doerr, All the Lights We Cannot See

"É claro que a vida é boa

E a alegria, a única indizível emoção

É claro que te acho linda

Em ti bendigo o amor das coisas simples

E claro que te amo

E tenho tudo para ser feliz

Mas acontece que eu sou triste..."

- Vinicius de Morais

It takes a world to settle down.

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.

- Claude Monet

You have to be the kind of person who can make the best out of a Tuesday. You know those people who live for the weekends? They’re wishing their life away. You have to find something worth living for or else you’ll look back and realize you’ve wasted your life away. — Drew Marvin, English Teacher

And you tried to change, didn’t you? Closed your mouth more. Tried to be softer, prettier, less volatile, less awake… You can’t make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that. And if he wants to leave, then let him leave. You are terrifying, and strange, and beautiful. Something not everyone knows how to love.

"You're the kind of poetry that I get."

"Gil, os outros, eles vão e vem na nossa vida, assim como as ondas vão e vem pra esse mar. Elas vem e se desfazem assim como as pessoas, e somem da nossa vida. Mas o mar ele tá ali, e quando mais profundo você for, mais solitário, mais quieto, mais silencioso ele tá. Tem que ser imenso pra saber ser sozinho, Gil." - Teus Olhos Meus

"Vladimir Nabokov, teaching his students how to read Kafka, pointed out to them that the insect into which Gregor Samsa is transformed is in fact a winged beetle, an insect that carries its wings under its armored back, and that if Gregor had only discovered that, he would have been able to escape. And then Nabokov added: 'Many a Dick and a Jane grow up like Gregor, unaware that they too have wings and can fly."

"A inércia é que é sinônimo de morte.

A lei da vida é mudar."

- Simone de Beauvoir

I am

afraid

that if

i open

myself

i will not stop

pouring. (why do i fear becoming a river.

what mountain gave me such shame.)"

- Eroision, Jamie Oliveira

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

- Mark Twain

“How do we forgive ourselves for all of the things we did not become?”

"I think about dying but I dont want to die. Not even close. In fact my problem is the complete opposite. I want to live, I want to escape. I feel trapped and bored and claustrophobic. There’s so much to see and so much to do but I somehow still find myself doing nothing at all. I’m still here in this metaphorical bubble of existence and I can’t quite figure out what the hell I’m doing or how to get out of it."

Ellen, there once was a time in your very own planet's history, long, long ago, when the earth was truly a paradise. The diversity of life was as mind-boggling as it was spectacular. Flowers sprang up in impossible places. Birds and their songs filled the air over every continent. Snow, fog, showers, or sunshine added sometimes shocking and unexpected beauty to every setting. Animals were loved as family members. And complete strangers smiled and waved to one another, as it was everyone's natural instinct to be kind, to give, and to love.

Yeah, Ellen, very little has changed.

See the good, The Universe

"And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. "

"Como mortais, vos aterrorizais de tudo, mas desejais tudo como se fosseis imortais. Ouvirás muitos dizerem: "aos cinquenta anos me refugiarei no ócio, aos sessenta estarei livre de meus encargos." E que fiador tens de uma vida tão longa? E quem garantirá que tudo irá conforme planejas? Não de envergonhas de reservar para ti apenas as sobras da vida e destinar à meditação somente a idade que já não serve mais para nada? Quão tarde começas a viver, quando já é hora de deixar de fazê-lo. Que negligência louca a dos mortais, de adiar os prudentes juízos, e a partir desse ponto, ao qual poucos chegaram, querer começar a viver!"

Sobre a brevidade da vida, de Sêneca.

• "se a vida é feita de fases, fazes de mim a tua vida."
• "The only time I feel good falling, is when I'm falling fast and hard for you. The only time I feel good sinking is when I'm sinking fast and deep for you. Why can't you just feel the way I do?"
• "Her eyes went down and cut you up and there's nothing like a dirty look from the one you want, or the one you've lost."
• "When you look at me like that my darling, what did you expect? I probably still adore you with your hands around my neck, or I did last time I checked."
• "I'm always just about to go and spoil the surprise, take my hands off of your eyes too soon. I'm going back to 505, if it's a seven hour flight or a forty-five minute drive. In my imagination, you're waiting lying on your side with your hands between your thighs and a smile."

If you keep asking "May I?" Ellen, I'll keep asking "Will you?"

It's never been up to me.

Tallyho, The Universe

assim como se atreve um trecho do sol espiar o mundo na fresta das nuvens num dia cinza assim como se ajeita uma flor a enfeitar uma árvore que já se pôs inverno assim como se esgueira um aranto numa rachadura ao alto de uma igreja secular assim como dança uma senhora na frente do espelho num dia que era pra ser como todos os outros assim como assusta bom um sorriso abraçar um outro na noite fria de uma cidade vazia

assim fora de hora só pela surpresa tem amor

'The real animal is still out there. Waiting for me, challenging me to fight back to stop him. But how do I stop the monster without becoming one myself?'

"Both. I want to stay. I want to leave. I am three oceans away from my soul." Nayyirah Waheed

"Met up with the dearest, little angel over the weekend, Ellen, but she was so, so sad.

She asked, in the sweetest of angel voices, how there can be so much love in the world, yet so few feel it. How there can be so much beauty, yet hardly anyone sees it. And how there can be so many miracles, yet most are ignored.

Poor thing.

So, Ellen, I reminded her of something far more important. I reminded her that whether or not one knows of the love, they are still bathed in it. Whether or not they see the beauty, they still add to it. And whether or not they recognize the miracles, they still perform them, every single day.

Then, we both just beamed.

Tallyho, The Universe"

"Continue arrancando as algas, papai. Limpe a sua mente. E maneje a grande luz. Mesmo que ninguém esteja olhando.

Com amor, sua filha, S." - Perdão, Leonard Peacock, de Matthew Quick

“How long has it been since someone touched part of you other than your body?” — Laurel Hoodwrit

"Enquanto a maré banhava a areia da praia, o Homem das Tulipas Holandês contemplava o oceano:

- Juntadora treplicadora envenenadora ocultadora reveladora. Repare nela, subindo e descendo, levando tudo consigo.

- O que é? - Anna perguntou.

- A água - respondeu o holandês. - Bem, e as horas."

- Peter Van Houten, Uma Aflição Imperial

Hal: Well let's say... let's say since you were little, and you've always dreamed of someday getting a lion. And you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait and the lion doesn't come. Then along comes a giraffe. You can be alone, or you can be with the giraffe.

Oliver: I'd wait for the lion.

Hal: That's why I worry about you.

"A utopia está lá no horizonte. Me aproximo dois passos, ela se afasta dois passos. Caminho dez passos e o horizonte corre dez passos. Por mais que eu caminhe, jamais alcançarei. Para que serve a utopia? Serve para isso: para que eu não deixe de caminhar."

- Eduardo Galeano

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it."

- Claude Monet

“Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.”

"O que tiver

De aguentar

Aguenta

Que no fim

O corpo é nada

Só a alma

Nos sustenta."

- Alan Kramer

“If watching is all you’re going to do, then you’re going to watch your life go by without you.” – Laverne, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"I love unmade beds. I love when people are drunk and crying and cannot be anything but honest in that moment. I love the look in people's eyes when they realize they're in love. I love the way people look when they first wake up and they've forgotten they surroundings. I love the gasp people take when their favourite character dies. I love when people close their eyes and drift to somewhere in the clouds. I fall in love with people and their honest moments all the time. I fall in love with their breakdowns and their smeared makeup and their daydreams. Honestly, it's just too beautiful to ever put into words."

"Não tolero ignorar os nomes daqueles com quem trato. A função adâmica do poeta move-o a nomear as coisas e as pessoas. Não só atribuir um nome aos que ainda não o têm, mas informar-se dos que já o têm. De resto um homem, antes de ser lixeiro, garçom ou motorista, é uma pessoa, quero saber seu nome."

- Murilo Mendes

• "The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just." - Martin Luther King Jr.
• "Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an' then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home?" - Harper Lee
• "Isn’t it ironic, how we kill flowers because we think that they are beautiful." - Unknown
• "Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength." — G.D Anderson
• "You may not agree with a woman, but to criticize her appearance — as opposed to her ideas or actions — isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all you. Insulting a woman’s looks when they have nothing to do with the issue at hand implies a lack of comprehension on your part, an...

• “I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold-hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.”
• “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
• "You act like it's you against the world, but really it's just you against yourself."
• "The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
• "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
• "People who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you."
• "Enquanto todo mundo espera a cura do mal e a loucura finge que isso tudo é norma...

"But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends."

- James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

"what a brilliant thing, to discover we've been wrong about some things, what a brilliant thing it is to grow."

- misfits: a personal manifesto by michaela coel

She packed my bags last night, pre-flight

Zero hour, 9 a.m.

And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then

I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife

It's lonely out in space

On such a timeless flight

And I think it's gonna be a long, long time

'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find

I'm not the man they think I am at home

Oh, no, no, no

I'm a rocket man

Rocket man

Burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it's gonna be a long, long time

'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find

I'm not the man they think I am at home

Oh, no, no, no

"Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of it's own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted."

- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

"To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending."

- Bell Hooks

• "Your mom's ring in your pocket, my picture in your wallet, your heart was glass, I dropped it. Champagne problems."
• "You had a speech, you're speechless, love slipped beyond your reaches and I couldn't give a reason. Champagne problems."
• "Your Midas touch on the chevy door, november flush and your flannel cure."
• "'This dorm was once a madhouse', I made a joke 'well, it's made for me'".
• "How evergreen, our group of friends. Don't think we'll say that word again, and soon they'll have the nerve to deck the halls that we once walked through."
• "I never was ready, so I watch you go."
• "'She would've made such a lovely bride, what a shame she's fucked in the head', they said. But you'll find the real thing instead, she'll patch up your tapestry that I shread, and hold your hand while dancing."

“You know that place between sleep and awake, that place where you still remember dreaming? That's where I’ll always love you.”

- Tink In Hook (1991)

"Let me tell you, people are mean to each other, but no voice is as mean as our own voices are to ourselves. Every day when you look in the mirror, and your mind is telling you all the things you are not: If those things are that you’re not cool enough, you’re not pretty enough, you’re not popular enough, you’re not successful enough, you’re not special, you’re not wanted, you’re not unique... Those are not the things you are not. Let me tell you the things you are not.

You are not somebody else’s opinion of you. You are not going nowhere just because you’re not where you want to be yet. You are not damaged goods just because you have made mistakes in your life. Those are the things you are not. Let me tell you the things that you are.

You are your own definition of beautiful, and worthwhile, and no one else’s definition. You are wiser, stronger, and smar...

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”

Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.”

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

"It went through a lot of things to get to where it is now, and it's a special song to me."

_____________________________

Put a price on emotion

I'm looking for something to buy

You've got my devotion

But man, I can hate you sometimes

I don't want to fight you

And I don't wanna sleep in the dirt

We'll get the drinks in

So I'll get to thinking of her

We'll be a fine line

We'll be a fine line

We'll be a fine line

We'll be a fine line

We'll be a fine line

We'll be a fine line

Test of my patience

There's things that we'll never know

You sunshine, you temptress

My hand's at risk, I fold

“Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines

he wrote a poem

And he called it "Chops"

because that was the name of his dog

And that's what it was all about

And his teacher gave him an A

and a gold star

And his mother hung it on the kitchen door

and read it to his aunts.

That was the year Father Tracy

took all the kids to the zoo

And he let them sing on the bus

And his little sister was born

with tiny toenails and no hair

And his mother and father kissed a lot

And the girl around the corner sent him a

Valentine signed with a row of X's

and he had to ask his father what the X's meant

• "And it ain't no use in turning on your light, babe, the light I never knowed, i'm on the dark side of the road."
• "But I wish there was something you would do or say to try and make me change my mind and stay. We never did too much talking anyway, so don't think twice, it's all right."
• "I once loved a woman, a child, i'm told. I gave her my heart, she wanted my soul; but don't think twice, it's all right."
• "So long, honey babe. Where I'm bound, I can't tell. Goodbye is too good a word, babe, so i'll just say fare thee well."
• "I ain't saying you treated me unkind; you could have done better, but I don't mind. You just kinda wasted my precious time, but don't think twice, it's all right."
• "I don't need any help to be breakable, believe me, I know nobody else who can lau...

“It’s from the last verse of Dante’s Comedy. It’s l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. It means, the love which moves the sun and other stars. It means God, in its own context.”

“Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor.

And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.”

- pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“The bad news is, people are crueler, meaner and more evil than you’ve ever imagined. The good news is, people are kinder, gentler and more loving than you’ve ever dreamed.”

- pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

• “A pior batalha da vida do ser humano é a que acontece dentro da cabeça dele. Eu to te falando isso, mas eu não sou maluco não. É só pq a cabeça da gente trabalha contra a gente as vezes. Eu sou o filho mais amado de Deus porque minha cabeça já fez eu tentar me matar, e deus me deu outra chance. Eu hoje em dia não peço mais nada pra deus, eu só agradeço. A coisa mais bonita na vida é você conseguir chegar na fase de enxergar as coisas pelo que ela são, e não pelo que a gente quer ver. Quando ce enxerga isso, ce vê beleza em tudo."
• “Eu pedi permissão pra morrer, mas ele me disse não, poque ele é meu pai, e pai sabe das coisas. E hoje eu to aqui, e eu sou muito feliz.”
• “Eu não conto isso pra ninguém não porque as pessoas olham pra mim e eu, desse jeito, sem dente e descalço, as pessoa...

“There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Hello!"

He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?"

"I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it."

"I don't think I'd like that," he said.

"You might if you tried."

"I never have."

She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good."

"What do you do, go around trying everything once?" he asked.

"Sometimes twice.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I said: what about my eyes?

He said: Keep them on the road.

I said: What about my passion?

He said: Keep it burning.

I said: What about my heart?

He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?

I said: Pain and sorrow.

He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

“I’ve been on antidepressants since August of last year. I was living alone in the city at the time and feeling a lot of anxiety. So I talked to a therapist, and she recommended antidepressants. At first I was nervous about taking them. There’s a bit of a stigma in the African American community. If you take any sort of medication, it’s like: ‘Oh, you crazy now.’ So the first thing I did was look on the Internet. I’m not even sure what I searched. But somehow I ended up finding Matt’s videos on YouTube. He was sort of documenting his own experience with antidepressants. He was black. He was male. He was queer. And he was doing fine. It just made me feel a lot less alone. I sent him a short message thanking him for his videos, and he started checking in on me about once a week. He’s been a great friend. We actually just met in person for the first time on Saturday.”

“A couple weeks ago we were coming home from visiting my brother in Long Island and we stopped at a burger place off the highway. He had a Junior Whopper. I had a Whopper. We split the fries. And while we were eating, he said: ‘You know what Daddy? You’re a really great Daddy. I love you Daddy.’ And that got me. I almost choked on my burger. Because it wasn’t bedtime. He wasn’t leaving for school. It was just off the cuff.”

"Daydream delusion, limousine eyelash

Oh, baby, with your pretty face

Drop a tear in my wineglass

Look at those big eyes

See what you mean to me

Sweet-cakes and milkshakes

I'm a delusion angel

I'm a fantasy parade

I want you to know what I think

Don't want you to guess anymore

You have no idea where I came from

We have no idea where we're going

Lodged in life

Like branches in a river

Flowing downstream

Caught in the current

I carry you

You'll carry me

That's how it could be

Don't you know me?

Don't you know me by now?"

"I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me, but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt."

• "Everybody here is watching you, cause you feel like home. You're like a dream come true. But if by chance you're here alone, can I have a moment before I go?"
• "Let me photograph you in this light in case it is the last time that we might be exactly like we were before we realized we were sad of getting old."
• "You still look like a movie. You still sound like a song."
• "Morning, her place. Burnt toast, Sunday. You keep her shirt; she keeps her word."
• "And she keeps a picture of you in her office downtown."
• "Buttons on a coat, light hearted joke. No proof, not much, but you saw enough."
• "Small talk, she drives. Coffee at midnight. The light reflects the chain on your neck."
• "She says 'look up', and your shoulders b...

“Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.”

― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

- James Baldwin

“I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much; my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold onto it. And then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude—for every single moment of my stupid, little life. You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure; but don’t worry….you will someday.”

― Alan Ball, American Beauty: The Shooting Script

• “It’s a funny thing when you think about it — time. Your sister sings a couple of bars of Rocky and for a split second I could smell the ring again, and then she tells me that when you were little kids you watched a lot of my movies and I'm thinking for a moment about my kids, when they were little, messy hair and matching pajamas and all that stuff, and I swear to you, I can see it all so very clearly. I could just reach out and touch it. In my experience, Kevin, there’s no such thing as a long time ago. There’s only memories that mean something and memories that don’t.”
• “Once I went to sleep over at my friend Lucy’s house and I got scared and my parents had to pick me up. Later I was sad I went home because I probably would have had fun if I stayed. So maybe if you stay here, you’ll have fun, and if you go...

"I was in a very dark place. I was alone and scared in rehab for an eating disorder that had gotten wildly out of control. At first, they wouldn’t let me have any kind of instrument either. […] I remember I begged and begged, until they finally agreed I could have a keyboard for one hour a day.

Every day I sat there on the floor and played. This is how the song “Rainbow” came to be. The whole album idea and tour and everything, came from me crying and singing and playing and dreaming until my hour was up and they took the keyboard away again. Every day I would just cry and play that song because I knew I had to get through that incredibly hard time."

- Kesha

• “Let each of you discover where your chance for greatness lies. Seize that chance and let no power on earth deter you.”
• “If the season could ever have any salvation, if it could ever make sense again, it would have to come tonight under a flood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger.”
• “He firmly believed that football, like other sports, used blacks, exploited them and then spit them out once their talents as running backs or linebackers or wide receivers had been fully exhausted. For a few lucky ones, that moment might not come until they were established in the pros. For others, it might come at the end of college. For most, it would all end in high school.”

• "Wearing our vintage misery; no, I think it looked a little better on me."
• "If touching love is touching god, no wonder i'm in heaven when i'm holding you."
• "I wonder about your wonders."
• "It was the Fourth of July, you and I were fireworks that went off too soon. And I miss you in the June gloom, too."
• "Do you remember the way I held your hand under the lamp post and ran home? This way so many times I could close my eyes."
• "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean any of it. I just got too lonely. In between being young and being right, you were my Versailles at night."
• "This is side one. Flip me over, I know I’m not your favorite record."
• "And I’m a sunshine machine, I want to get stuck. I want to get stuck, and be golden in your memory."
• "I’m coming apart at the seams, pitchin...

“I had an awakening on a balcony in Seattle. I was listening to soul music on my Walkman. And I was paying attention to the music. And suddenly I realized that I was the attention itself. I realized that I’m not my mind—I’m the awareness of my mind. We’re all just drops of consciousness and if you get to the point where you can turn around and see your drop, you’ll discover that it’s connected to an ocean of consciousness. And then you’ll be illumined. I don’t care if anyone believes me. I’m not trying to convert anyone. There’s nothing to convert because everyone is exactly where they’re supposed to be right now.”

Encostei-me a ti, sabendo que eras somente onda.

Sabendo bem que eras nuvem, depus a minha vida em ti.

Como sabia bem tudo isso, e dei-me ao teu destino frágil,

fiquei sem poder chorar, quando caí.

(Epigrama nº 8, Cecília Meireles)

Candy says I've come to hate my body

And all that it requires in this world

Candy says I'd like to know completely

What others so discretely talk about

I'm gonna watch the blue birds fly over my shoulder

I'm gonna watch them pass me by

Maybe when I'm older

What do you think I'd see

If I could walk away from me

Candy says I hate the quiet places

That cause the smallest taste of what will be

Candy says I hate the big decisions

That cause endless revisions in my mind

I'm gonna watch the blue birds fly over my shoulder

I'm gonna watch them pass me by

Maybe when I'm older

What do you think I'd see

If I could walk away from me

Arakawa tem poucas lembranças de como sobreviveu ao bombardeio; seus pais e seus quatro irmãos foram mortos no ataque. Quando solicitada a escrever uma mensagem para as gerações futuras, ela respondeu: "Nani mo omoitsukanai" (não consigo pensar em nada).

"Abstraindo as diferenças nacionais, que naturalmente são muito grandes, e levando em conta somente que se trata de um movimento global – algo que nunca aconteceu nesta forma antes – e considerando [...] o que realmente diferencia esta geração em todos os países das gerações anteriores, [...] é sua determinação para agir, sua alegria em agir, e certeza de poder mudar as coisas pelos seus próprios esforços."

(ARENDT, 1994, p.174-175).

"Why is there a need to fill every empty space? Isn't it with a clear sky that we best see the light?"

"I've been here a long time. Out of Cuba. A lot of black folks are Cuban. You wouldn't know from being here now. I was a wild little shortie, man. Just like you. Running around with no shoes on, the moon was out. This one time, I run by this old... this old lady. I was running, howling. Kinda of a fool, boy. This old lady, she stopped me. She said... 'Running around, catching a lot of light. In moonlight, black boys look blue. You're blue". That's what I'm gonna call you: 'Blue''."

The worst thing in the world can happen, but the next day the sun will come up. And you will eat your toast. And you will drink your tea.

— Rhian Ellis, from After Life

Boom then crash, the shattering of glass

I dive to the floor, busting my ass

The hell was that

Was all that I say

Then I see the pool of blood

Then I see my mom she's dead

No emotion in the commotion

I wasn't even sad, even when I learned the bullet was meant for my dad

Vietnam made pops crazy he was already half-dead

So why couldn't that'd be him that got shot in the head?

All the news that fits the print

Momma's death went unreported not a whiff or word or hint

They don't care about us niggers is how my pops explained it

But I didn't know I was a nigga till my dad proclaimed it

Six months later my pops is dead too

Drug-related shots fired his skin turned ...

Watching the moon

at midnight,

solitary, mid-sky,

I knew myself completely,

no part left out.

- Izumi Shikibu (tr. by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani)

"There must be some way out of here" said the joker to the thief

"There's too much confusion", I can't get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

"No reason to get excited", the thief he kindly spoke

"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late".

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl

"Every freaking time, I have to introduce myself to the universe all over again."

i observe men in silence, how they leave plates on dining room tables, how they slam doors, how they take up whole couch with legs sprawled and lounging arms, how they do not filter speech, too confident, too loud. voices always violent, everything a war.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

Sylvia Plath

I exist in two places, here and where you are.

Margaret Atwood

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies.

David Mitchell

I’m kissing you now—across the gap of a thousand years.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

Euripides

(tr. Anne Carson)

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Michelangelo

To carve your name onto the trophy

of the floorless. To spit-shine it for eternity.

To become not why your father drinks, but what

brings him on a chariot of tremors

to drink again. To sign up for the obituary

circus: Come see the magical, the ones

who do what others cannot.

See the Exhaust Swallower.

The Dangling Acrobat. The Blue-Finned Mermaid

who floats face down in a tank

with gills on her wrists. To stare and be stared at

forever. The unsaid word. The forgotten

dream. The poem she will

always write, and never finish.

I too have taken the god into my mouth,

chewed it up and tried not to choke on the bones

Rattlesnake it was, pantries

and good though a little oily.

(Forget the phallic symbolism:

two differences:

snake tastes like chicken,

and who ever credited the prick with wisdom?)

All people are driven

to the point of eating their gods

after a time: it’s the old greed

for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness,

the lust to feel what it does to you

when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh

when you swallow it down

and you can see with it’s own cold eyes

look out through murder.

People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty” - a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines - and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple of days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran. Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend...

"Have some fire. Be unstoppable. Be a force of nature. Be better than anyone here, and don’t give a damn what anyone thinks. There are no teams here, no buddies. You’re on your own. Be on your own."

— Christina Yang

August 30th, 1994

Kathleen,

I awoke with the taste of your mouth, your flesh, your touch in my mouth, my brain, my hands, my eyes, my everything. All day I remembered and smiled quietly to myself.

I spoke softly to others.

Everything reminded me of you.

The blush on a frosty pink rose.

The resonant intensity of blue lobelia standing staunchly in the terracotta pot under the golden chain tree.

The sun, the sky, the cool clear breeze.

The fullness of September.

profusions of clear color: of roses

of lavender and white impatiens

of misty, heatherish caryopterous

of deep blue veronica and salvia.

Everything shining, new and clear, calling to me: “I am the Earth. This is my fullness, my beauty, my everything.”

"When I was four, I didn’t even know about the world, and now me and ma are going to live in it forever and ever until we’re dead. This is a street in a city in a country called America, and earth. That’s a blue and green planet, always spinning, so I don’t know why we don’t fall off. Then, there’s outer space. And nobody knows where’s heaven. Ma and I have decided that because we don’t know what we like, we get to try everything. There are so many things out here. And sometimes, it’s scary, but that’s okay, because it’s still just you and me.❞

― Room (2015) dir. Lenny Abrahamson

But. In that stadium, tens of thousands of the happiest people in the world stomped their feet and sang “don’t burn out” in unison, and the air felt electric with power, with joy. By the second time those lines came up, I was yelling right along with them. So what if I was still crying– I was smiling too. In less than three minutes, the force of that experience undid months of ingrained reaction to that song. In less than three minutes, a bunch of strangers unknowingly helped me cleanse that song of the stain of depression. It felt like happiness. It felt like healing.

— DON’T BURN OUT (Or, Loving One Direction Saved My Life)

http://witchsong.com/2015/03/dont-burn-o...

I saw it — did you know that? I did. You’ve always been sentimental in stupid ways, can never say it out loud, always got to find a different way to show it. I get it, you know. I do. Hell, I did almost the same thing with your letters before I lost them, keeping them tucked up in my pocket every time I was out in the field. And isn’t that a riot and a half?

Maybe you think about it like a good luck charm. Or maybe you just like to see her pretty face — I wouldn’t blame you. I’d like her for myself if it wasn’t plain as day to me the way you are about her. Remember what your ma used to say? “Gone in the head.” Well that’s what you are. If there wasn’t a war on you two would already be living upstate in some real nice brownstone with two dogs and a kid. As it is, when the two of you get out of this alive, that’s where you’ll end up anyway. Don’t be nervous abou...

There are a bunch of stories in this world. I know this because I slept through every single one of them in school with you snoring away right beside me. Long stories, short stories, ghost stories. Sad stories and romance stories, parables, tall tales, and even the stories that have happy endings — And let me tell you, men on Mars make more sense to me than those do these days.

I’m the story that’ll never get told, but that doesn’t much bother me. They’ll remember you which is as it should be. Just like me, they were caught off guard. Nobody ever saw you coming, not the army, not the country. You went and blindsided us all. And now that all the storytellers have got a hold of you, you’re gonna live forever.

I remember maybe third day of Catechism when Sister Catherine said that each and every one of us are sinners and there wasn’...

Someone asked me what “Champagne Supernova” is about. I was like, “Who gives a fuck what it’s about?” And he’s going, “But surely when you write it you must know?” On stage, two hours later, in Scotland, with an acoustic guitar, I’m playing it and there’s a 15-year old kid, he’s got his top off and he’s singing it, crying his eyes out, and I’m thinking, “That’s what it’s about.”

NUNCA ENTREGA MENOS DO QUE TUDO SEMPRE

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” ― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Já não tenho alma. (…) Só sinto um vácuo imenso onde alma tive. Sou qualquer coisa de exterior apenas, Consciente apenas de já nada ser.

— Fernando Pessoa.

Aconteceu uma coisa muito engraçada na hora que eu te abracei hoje e eu queria muito dividir, porque amo dividir esses trem (cê já sabe que eu sou troxa mesmo ihsaufihfjkdn). Meu olho ficou cheio de água, sabe? E não é a primeira vez que isso acontece quando eu penso na nossa amizade (inclusive tá acontecendo agora que eu tô te escrevendo isso).

O que eu queria dividir com você é que ontem, pela primeira vez, eu lembrei de uma coisa que eu li. No dia da prova de penal alguém disse que tava com medo e eu te ouvi dizer “calma, é só um pedaço de papel”. Daí eu lembrei que “everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water, and everyone you love is made of stardust”. O ponto todo de eu te contar isso é que eu acho que descobri porque meu olho enche de água quando eu penso na nossa relação e no que a gente tem: eu sou alérgica a poeira estelar hahah...

Some people survive and talk about it. Some people survive and go silent. Some people survive and create. Everyone deals with unimaginable pain in their own way, and everyone is entitled to that, without judgement. So the next time you look at someone’s life covetously, remember…you may not want to endure what they are enduring right now, at this moment, whilst they sit so quietly before you, looking like a calm ocean on a sunny day. Remember how vast the ocean’s boundaries are. Whilst somewhere the water is calm, in another place in the very same ocean, there is a colossal storm.

— People Survive in Different Ways | Nikita Gill

Don’t even think of trying to redeem me. I regret NOTHING. No woman with any self-respect would have done less.

The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I’m not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. Three cheers for Eve.

— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.

— Sylvia Plath, “Crossing the Water”

i dunno, people come and people go, they leave and come back again, and sometimes you feel better but sometimes it hits you in the middle of the night and you’re like fuck, that one really hurt.

— honest words from a drunk friend

"He can't figure out if it's depressing or reassuring, that a person's greatest despair barely makes a ripple in the world."

Our love is golden, shining, lucky like a falling star, plummeting to the damp earth with fifty thousand children sending their wishes up to it drenched in hope.

Lucky because we are invisible, lucky because this life is hard for girls who fall for other girls as well as boys or instead of boys, lucky because we both live in the same country in the same city and we managed to find each other’s hands in the dark.

Lucky like a four leafed clover nobody can ever see in the mess of green, lucky like a dandelion’s head falling apart and losing everything in one breath, lucky like an eyelash fallen on your cheek.

We are full of guarded hope; wishes made but kept in cages because we could never quite trust them, kisses that found cheeks instead of lips because there might be somebody watching from the other side of the road.

"What is the misfortune of the Minority Mistress?

I have understood the body of a white woman before I have understood my own.

I’ve memorized Pink Purity and learned Dysmorphia because I am Different. But -

I have been gifted with a sacred unraveling.

There is power in unearthing my limbs for myself."

some thoughts on my consistently shifting relationship w my body/feeling shame for black sexuality

"I asked the sun, "tell me about the big bang"

The sun said, "it hurts to become"."

“A mother doesn’t wake up one morning not loving her son. Do you get that? The only thing that’s gonna happen is I’ll love you more and more. And you’ll be the one loving me less and less, but life works that way. We deal with it.” - Mommy (2014)

"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."

"We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life."

The Truman Show

"Here is the most beautiful thing in the world: There are people doing great things that they don't know are great yet.

They sit in their bedrooms, not knowing they are writing the most beautiful song you will ever hear. They go to their jobs, hiding great novels somewhere in the depths of their computers. They paint, not knowing how important their picture will be.

They do all this with no promise of any reward or any recognition, and so there are truly great, secret things, everywhere. Waiting to explode.

It is the most beautiful thing in the world."

"In the end, there's still a rainbow trapped in the edge of the glass that cuts you.

As slow as ships on the horizon.

As quick as a life."

não sei quando devo te contar que eu sempre vou embora

e deixo tudo

e deixo todos

é fácil pra mim mudar de cidade, de faculdade, de sotaque, de cerveja preferida.

meu único vínculo é com meus devaneios.

meu lar é meu delírio.

meu ninho é o abandono.

mas olhar pra você assim de lado, como os olhos beijando os meus, sorrindo como a criança de seis anos na foto da sua geladeira enquanto sinto a paciência das suas mãos envolvendo as minhas que em nada crê, me faz desejar que eu nunca mais queira ir embora.

mas eu ainda quero. faz parte da parte do meu signo que não sai no jornal.

eu quero dar o fora e quero que você venha comigo.

"You’d break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells."

To have a thought, there must be an object—

the field is empty, sloshed with gold, a hayfield thick

with sunshine. There must be an object so land

a man there, solid on his feet, on solid ground, in

a field fully flooded, enough light to see him clearly,

the light on his skin and bouncing off his skin.

He’s easy to desire since there’s not much to him,

vague and smeary in his ochers, in his umbers,

burning in the open field. Forget about his insides,

his plumbing and his furnaces, put a thin...

• "O segredo, dizia Chang, o dono da loja, não é descobrir o que as pessoas escondem, e sim entender o que elas mostram. Mas Chang está morto. Existe algo mais íntimo para exibir ao mundo que as entranhas? Existe algo tão obsceno?"
• "Sustentar aquele olhar escuro foi uma experiência difícil. Fez com que eu me sentisse desamparado. Fiquei com a impressão de estar sendo visto de verdade pela primeira vez na vida. E também de estar vendo algo que o mundo não tinha me mostrado até então."
• "O que diferencia uma pessoa de outra é o quanto cada um quer o que não pode ter. Nossa ração de poeira das estrelas."

• "It should not be bittersweet when the scene out on the street is so alluring, but as a music man by trade it’s not hard to be persuaded and into rain. When I find my lost boys club, and I don’t mind roadhouse grub, but for all the ticket stub, I still I cannot overcome the way I’m feeling."
• "I'm ready for the flight or to fall off a cliff, but if it's alright with you I'd rather not miss out on us."
• "You say you never wanna be saved, well, that's okay cause I wouldn't know how. Just know that the best that I'll ever be is whatever you make me and wherever you are."
• "You're on my mind, and the things that you say hurt me most of the time, but I'm on your side, cause I know I'm not easy to deal with sometimes. But I'm sinking fast, so it's alright."