Daniel

“I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I’m talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.”
― Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

“He remembered the way love had burned through him like a flame under glass, grasping outward, devouring what air it had left before it choked.”
― Micah Nemerever, These Violent Delights

“I've found that when you're wrapped up in the process of dating and want so badly to have something work out with someone -anyone- it's easy to forget that your choices aren't limited to one person or the other. There's also the choice I always forget about: To not choose anyone in order to keep myself open to someone who IS right for me.”
― Rachel Machacek, The Science of Single: One Woman's Grand Experiment in Modern Dating, Creating Chemistry, and Finding Love

“Rain still falls during the late rainy season, as do tears even when it’s too late.”
― Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City