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#1

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

tags: acceptance, hope, life, love

2664 likes

#2

“Good question, but no answer. Good questions never have answers.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

19 likes

#3

“There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others.”
― Tom Robbins

tags: human, wierd

587 likes

#4

“Getting inside a character might seem like a vacation from being you . But face it , you’re never not you . No matter what world you create you’re always dealing with your own shit . Same shit , different mask . You’ve chosen to explore a certain character because something about it resonates with you . Don’t pretend for a moment that writing as a different person is evading reality . If anything it allows you a greater freedom to explore parts of yourself you wouldn’t dare consciously examine .”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different

tags: insightful, wisdom, writing-process

9 likes

#5

“You've heard of people calling in sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well?

It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, "Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore." Call in well.”
― Tom Robbins

343 likes

#6

“Not a single person was trying to reach me, and even if they had been, they wouldn't have said what I wanted to hear.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

tags: loneliness

1 likes

#7

“The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling - that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

tags: body, candess-campbell, clarissa-pin-kola-estes, culture, soul, spirit, wolves, women, women-who-run-with-the-wolves

18 likes

#8

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck

tags: creativity, genius, poem-in-your-pocket-day

803 likes

#9

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

2247 likes

#11

“It seems odd to me to think of my voice scratched into a wax cylinder, trapped like a spirit caught in a jar. Worse still a computer chip: the tip of my tongue striking my teeth, the glottal contractions in my throat, even the air that circulates through my lungs and my blood, all somehow frozen onto a thumb drive that I can toss in my purse. A song is best sustained through performance, where it can respond to the world around it. Be shaped by its surroundings. Made new. In that way it's like a story, never so alive as when it's being told.”
― Adrienne Celt, The Daughters

tags: live-performance, music

0 likes

#11

“You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things.”
― Andy Warhol

tags: creativity, individuality, originality, warhol

312 likes

#12

“You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

197 likes

#14

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”
― Jim Jarmusch

tags: authenticity, context, creative-process, creativity, imitation, inspiration, originality, postmodernism, rules, sense-of-wonder, sources, transformation

1624 likes

#15

“She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit's wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him. Whatever his wife said about this incorrigible flaw did no good. I suspect, in fact, she took pleasure in suffering his nature. Though give him credit, Mr. Malakite's fields were immaculate. No plant left its bed and wandered off as a 'volunteer'. He scrubbed the radishes under the thin stream of a hose. He spread his wares neatly on the trestle table at the Saturday market.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

tags: mr-mrs-malakite

8 likes

#16

“But you cannot change your nature. If you are a lonely creature, this cannot be undone. Something will always crop up to remind you.”
― Adrienne Celt

1 likes

#17

“When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. 'A memoir is the lost inheritance,' you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.”
― Ondaatje Michael.

tags: warlight

1 likes

#18

“We ate our fill, but there was more left when we was done. 'It’ll be in the icebox if y’all want some more later on,' she told us. There weren’t no way I would have gone back and eat more. I knowed they was being extra nice to us right then, but if we didn’t act right, they would put us out. That’s how folks do.”
― Eddie Whitlock, Evil Is Always Human

tags: compassion, evil, humanity, hunger

2 likes

#19

“I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn’t want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

tags: writing

12 likes

#20

“The unicursal path of the labyrinth is what differentiates it and sets it apart as a spiritual tool. The labyrinth does not engage our thinking minds. It invites our intuitive, pattern-seeking, symbolic mind to come forth. It presents us with only one, but profound, choice. To enter a labyrinth is to choose to walk a spiritual path.”
― Dr. Lauren Artress

tags: spiritual-tool

0 likes

#21

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

28805 likes

#22

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

tags: adulthood, aging, childhood, creation, death, reading, refugees, stories, writing

169 likes

#23

“He had to imply there was an element of choice, and in a sense there was: to get completely inside the mind with no barriers, he must be invited. The person must be relaxed – at least in the beginning.”
― Cage Dunn, Purpose

tags: manipulation

0 likes

#24

“Beautiful face. Beautiful body. Horrible attitude. It was the holy trinity of hot boys.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, Obsidian

tags: boys, hot, humor

3254 likes

#25

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

tags: death, life, living, religion

1243 likes

#26

“Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

tags: awkward, creative, creativity, disagreeable, envy, intimidating, intimidation, mediocre, mediocrity, misunderstood, odd, original, originality, outcast, peculiar, strange, unusual

267 likes

#27

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

tags: manners, society

517 likes

#28

“He senses where the cut -- which already exists, just waiting to be revealed -- will yield to his blow, and he has already divined, to the nearest millimeter, the figure that will be drawn forth, a figure which only the uninformed might impute to the will of the sculptor. No, on the contrary, the sculptor merely unveils the shape -- for talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.”
― Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody

0 likes

#29

“They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible

tags: shame

5 likes

#30

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

tags: humor

22516 likes

#31

“I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

tags: introspection, philosophy, society, weakness

181 likes

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