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“Line, I love you. I really love you, Line, but I don’t have time to think about that, there are so many things I have to think about, this wind, for example, I have to go out now and walk in the wind. Not with you, Line, don’t be angry. Walking in the wind is something you have to do alone, because there is a tiger and a piano whose music kills birds, and only the wind can banish the fear, it’s a well-known fact, I’ve been aware of it for a long time.”
― Ágota Kristóf, Yesterday

“I missed her every day. I missed her in ways I didn't yet understand—in ways I wouldn't find out for years to come. I missed her with this deep sort of regret, even though there was nothing I could have done. She never wanted anyone to see the monster on her shoulder, so she hid it, and when she finally took the monster's hand, it broke our hearts.
It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn't exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it. Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.
Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.
And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.
I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.
And I would never wish this pain on anyone.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“We spend all evening wrapped up in each other, listening to music, just like I’ve wanted to—since the morning after I first kissed her and found her sleeping here. Just like I dreamed of before I even realized she was the dream.”
― Elsie Silver, Wild Love

“Please take no offense, but our music was revolutionary before whites liked it, and it will be after.”
― Tia Williams, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

“Being a fan isn't always about the thing you're a fan of. Okay well, it sort of is, but there is much more to it than just going online and screaming that you love something. Being a fan has given me people to talk to about the things that I like for the past five years. Being a fan has made me better friends online than I've ever encountered in real life; it has entered me into a community where people are joined in love and passion and hope and joy and escape. Being a fan has given me a reason to wake up, something always to look forward to, something to dream about while I'm trying to fall asleep.

And people sneer. Sure. I get it. Adults especially. They see all these teenage girls and they think it's because we're stupid. They only see the tiny percentage of fans who take it too far – the stalkers – and they think we're all like that. They think we only love the band because of their looks; they think we only like their music because it's relatable. They think all of us are girls. They think all of us are straight.

They think we're dumb little girls who spend all our time screaming because we want to marry a musician.

They don't understand half of it. Any of it. How could they? Adults don't think teenagers can do anything, anyway.

But despite everything in the world being terrible, we choose to stand by The Ark. We choose hope, light, joy, friendship, faith, even when our lives aren't perfect, or exciting, or fun, or special, like the boys from The Ark. I might be a disappointing student, without many close friends, with a life of mediocrity waiting for me back at home – an average degree from an average university, an average job and an average life – but I will always have this.

In an otherwise mediocre existence, we choose to feel passion.”
― Alice Oseman, I Was Born for This

“I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can't imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year's festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn't place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex's "Monolith."
The priest was also up to his ears in whatever he had taken to carry out his temple duties, so he bent his magic powers of hearing to the music and caught the sexy crooning of Marc Bolan.
He smiled. That's good stuff, he said.
Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat.
It's nothing I've ever heard before, he replied, but I like it. He pulled his elbows in tight and shimmied, moving his head gravely from side to side, transfixed by pleasure. The priest, swaying his own ass to the beat—he was nearly eighty, but on mushrooms he was a jaguar-said, I was thinking about you, believe it or not; look at this.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires

“A love that knew no boundaries. The kind of love that inspires music that lasts through the ages. A love that should be felt and meant and treasured.”
― Tillie Cole, A Thousand Boy Kisses

“Steven Seagal makes movies only blind people could love. I'm glad he goes full Helen Keller and makes music you have to be deaf to appreciate.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“I have seen people struggle to learn – painting, gardens, language, hand-skills, foot-skills – and I have seen them triumph. I have seen kindnesses large and wild enough to transform you. I have heard the best jokes in the world and music so sweet I thought I might fall down because of it. I have seen so much done for love, over and over. I have seen people die for love and live for love. I have seen birth, and birth again. I have known such joy. The joy,”
― Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures

“We get tired, we get weary, we get out of tune with God's music. The praise we attempt to sing, the speaking of His grace…it falls flat like an old,weary guitar string. That's why we have to go out best to let Christ tune our hearts daily—with tension, with gentle rebukes and loving comfort, strumming and tightening until a pure note wings from our soul.
And then we can honestly sing of His grace once again.”
― LaKaysha Stenersen, Sing Thy Grace

“Deep down she was scared of becoming her mother. She didn't want to replicate her parents' mariage. Still staring blankly at the book of regrets. She wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they'd got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped. She had never wanted to play that game. Bertrand Russel wrote but to fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she was just scared of living.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The chemistry between their voices—his vulnerability, her fragility—it grabs you and doesn’t let you go. With his voice deep and smooth, and her voice higher and raspier, they somehow still meld together effortlessly, like two voices that have been singing together for ages. They created a deeply heartfelt call and response—a story of this romantic and idealized future that may never come to pass.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Time hangs heavy on us and I find that I am waiting, waiting for her days to pass, trying to meet the bare qualification of life which is for her to have existed in time. In this lonely place I am indeed not free: the kitchen is a cell, a place of no possibility. I have given up my membership of the world I used to live in. Sometimes I listen to music or read, and it is like a ray of light coming in from outside, bright and painful, making me screw up my eyes. When we go for a walk I see young women in the street, beautiful and careless, and a pang of mourning for some oblique, lost self makes my heart clench. I look down at my daughter sleeping in her pushchair, the dark fringe of her lashes forming arcs on her pale skin, and a contrary wind of love gusts over me; and for some time this is how I am, blown this way and that, careering around like a crazy, febrile gauge trying to find north.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“We only need to be
To be is all we need
Fill your mind with the divine
And guard against deceit
Feeling generates
Proclaim and create
Fill your heart with love,
And alchemize the hate”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“I Won’t Write Your Obituary

You asked if you could call to say goodbye if you were ever really gonna kill yourself.
Sure, but I won’t write your obituary.
I’ll commission it from some dead-end journalist who will say things like:
“At peace… Better place… Fought the good fight…”
Maybe reference the loving embrace of Capital-G-God at least 4 times.
Maybe quote Charles fucking Bukowski.
And I won’t stop them because I won’t write your obituary.

But if you call me, I will write you a new sky, one you can taste.
I will write you a D-I-Y cloud maker so on days when you can’t do anything you can still make clouds in whatever shape you want them.
I will write you letters, messages in bottles, in cages, in orange peels, in the distance between here and the moon, in forests and rivers and bird songs.
I will write you songs. I can’t write music, but I’ll find Rihanna, and I’ll get her to write you music if it will make you want to dance a little longer.
I will write you a body whose veins are electricity because outlets are easier to find than good shrinks, but we will find you a good shrink.
I will write you 1-800-273-8255, that’s the suicide hotline; we can call it together.

And yeah, you can call me, but I won’t tell you it’s okay, that I forgive you.
I won’t say “goodbye” or “I love you” one last time.
You won’t leave on good terms with me,
Because I will not forgive you.
I won’t read you your last rights, absolve you of sin, watch you sail away on a flaming viking ship, my hand glued to my forehead.
I will not hold your hand steady around a gun.

And after, I won’t come by to pick up the package of body parts you will have left specifically for me.
I’ll get a call like “Ma’am, what would you have us do with them?”
And I’ll say, “Burn them. Feed them to stray cats. Throw them at school children. Hurl them at the sea. I don’t care. I don’t want them.”
I don’t want your heart. It’s not yours anymore, it’s just a heart now and I already have one.
I don’t want your lungs, just deflated birthday party balloons that can’t breathe anymore.
I don’t want a jar of your teeth as a memento.
I don’t want your ripped off skin, a blanket to wrap myself in when I need to feel like your still here.
You won’t be there.
There’s no blood there, there’s no life there, there’s no you there. I want you.
And I will write you so many fucking dead friend poems, that people will confuse my tongue with your tombstone and try to plant daisies in my throat before I ever write you an obituary while you’re still fucking here.
So the answer to your question is “yes”.
If you’re ever really gonna kill yourself, yes, please, call me.”
― Nora Cooper

“By habit we perceive ourselves and the world around us as solid, real, and enduring. Yet without much effort, we can easily determine that not one aspect within the whole world’s system exists independent of change. I had just been in one physical location, and now I was in another; I had experienced different states of mind. We have all grown from babies to adults, lost loved ones, watched children grow, known changes in weather, in political regimes, in styles of music and fashion, in everything. Despite appearances, no aspect of life ever stays the same. The deconstruction of any one object—no matter how dense it appears, such as an ocean liner, our bodies, a skyscraper, or an oak tree—will reveal the appearance of solidity to be as illusory as permanence. Everything that looks substantial will break down into molecules, and into atoms, and into electrons, protons, and neutrons. And every phenomenon exists in interdependence with myriad other forms. Every identification of any one form has meaning only in relationship to another. Big only has meaning in relation to small. To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“Isn't it true that the world's entertainment scene is looking towards Africa? Now that the world loves African music genres like #Kalpop, Afrobeats, Benga, Bongo Flava, Kwaito, Lingala, Gengetone, among others, let's embrace being who we are. The cradle of life! A cradle of life blesses more than it curses. It LOVES and never HATES because it's understanding. But how can I LOVE you if I don't know how to LOVE myself? How can we be ONE if I still believe that my TRIBE is better than yours?
[Africa Day Statement, May 25, 2021.]”
― DON SANTO

“You know those people you meet who just feel safe? They radiate certainty and belonging, like everything will be okay for them, because they know how to make things okay. If you’re lucky enough to spend a day with them they will go on with their lives and let you be a tourist in there. They make each moment their own, in small ways, like having preferences about the music, the colours, the smells, the direction, the order of things. And they will talk about their lives in a way that doesn’t leave any space for questioning. It’s not like … hello, this is my life, do you think it’s okay? Like I do … It’s more like: “Hey, this is my life! It’s nice, isn’t it? Now show me yours!”
― Charlotte Eriksson, He loved me some days. I'm sure he did: 99 essays on growth through loss

“God was dead: to begin with.
And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead.

Love was dead.

Death was dead.

A great many things were dead.

Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet.

Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead.

But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water.

Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower.

Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up:

“are ghosts dead
are ghosts dead or alive
are ghosts deadly”

but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):”
― Ali Smith, Winter