reuven > reuven's Quotes

“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
― Richard Siken

“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it”
― Frank O'Hara

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much”
― Frank O'Hara

“I’d like to tell you
not to be afraid, but I’ve lost

my voice. I’m not used to all these
legs, these claws, these feelers.
It’s the old story, predictable
as fallout—the rearrangement of molecules.
And everyone is surprised
and no one understands

why each man tries to kill
the thing he loves, when the change
comes over him. So now you know
what I never found the time to say.
Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower.
You know I always loved you.”
― Lawrence Raab

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I am your shower curtain and I am watching you. I surround you, I shield you, and I like you. I like to see the water touch you, travel down upon you, searching, falling away from you. I like to see you lather. I like to see you rinse. I like to see you thinking your thoughts with your eyes closed. I do not like to hear you hum. I do not like to hear you sing. I like you quiet. I like you thinking, silently, your lips moving, your eyes closed tight. I like your fingers. Your wrists, your toes. I like your shins. Your knees. I like the way the water funnels between your legs and cascades down, turning in corkscrews. I like it when you like yourself. When you give a moment to your thighs. When you give a moment to the back of your neck, to the inner fold of your arm. Take a moment. Give yourself time. Take the soap and make circles on your flesh. Make slow circles on your flesh. Make long elliptical shapes upon your beautiful flesh. Your beautiful flesh today. Tomorrow your flesh will be different. It will be older. Appreciate it now. Your flesh is a miracle. You started from nothing. From an egg too small to see. Then a relentless multiplication of cells, each one a miracle, each one a preposterous happening. And from this ridiculous profusion now you are you. You are a giant. You are a giant and water is falling upon you and you are cleaning yourself because you are beautiful. Please don’t think about anything else. I know I said I liked to see you think but that, i realize now, is not true. I don’t want to see you think. I only want the elliptical touching of your flesh. throw your mind away and enjoy your wet flesh. thrill in your existence. Your persistence. the fact that you can be here, under this falling water. this, as much as any other reason, is why you are here, why you exist. to enjoy this. to feel this. it is good enough. It is good enough to justify everything else.”
― Dave Eggers

“I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.”
― Andrea Gibson

“and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the first time his fingers touched the keys
the same way a soldier holds his breath
the first time his finger clicks the trigger.
We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.”
― Andrea Gibson

“I’m never gonna wait
that extra twenty minutes
to text you back,
and I’m never gonna play
hard to get
when I know your life
has been hard enough already.
When we all know everyone’s life
has been hard enough already
it’s hard to watch
the game we make of love,
like everyone’s playing checkers
with their scars,
saying checkmate
whenever they get out
without a broken heart.
Just to be clear
I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
I intend to leave this life
so shattered
there’s gonna have to be
a thousand separate heavens
for all of my flying parts.”
― Andrea Gibson

“Touch was absolutely
out of the question. I couldn’t stop sweating. My heart, a butterfly pinned
to a glacier. Empires fell inside my mouth. I touched myself like a pogrom
& broke my sex into a history of inconsequential shames. I wept viciously
inside of my own stomach & had it condemned. From an upside-down bell
I drank silence, subsisted on the memory of someone else’s hands. Wolves
sang & I did not answer. I forgot their names. Mornings were the worst, then
there were days & evenings. Streetlights & darkened sycamore & suburban
grief so full it made me foolish. I shattered my fist on the Lord’s jaw. Sorrow
sat, licking my wrists & my neck. I slept at its convenience. O, uncelebrated
body. My penis, a lighthouse on the bottom of the ocean, shining shadows
at the undersides of boats. Nobody drowned for so many years. Desperate
for the making of those candy-throated ghosts, I found the rooms between
the violence of comets. I threw myself into anything’s path. Even the sky
bent around me. How lonely to be something that nothing wants to kill. (So I Locked Myself Inside A Star for Twenty Years)”
― Jeremy Radin

“3. I am made up of substance and what animates it, and neither one can ever stop existing, any more than it began to.
Every portion of me will be reassigned as another portion of the world, and that in turn transformed into another. Ad
infinitum.
I was produced through one such transformation, and my parents too, and so on back. Ad infinitum.”
― Markus Aurelius

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple”
― Adrienne Rich

“Origins and History of Consciousness

III.

It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.

But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“The faggots remind us that to become undone is our greatest gift to ourselves. It is truly our greatest path to being response-able - to feel our feelings authentically makes us able to respond to the conditions around us with an open heart”
― Tourmaline, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.

The faggots knew the first. Faggot ass-kicking is a time-honored sport of the men. But the faggots did not know about the second. They had never thought about winning before. They did not even know what winning meant. So they asked the strong women and the strong women said winning was like surviving, only better. As the strong women explained winning, the faggots were surprised and then excited. The faggots knew about surviving for they always had and this was going to be just plain better. That made ass-kicking different. Getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down