Intertext

"It was a game of chance I entered into and my heart was the
wager. Such games can only be played once"

-Jeanette Winterson “The Passion” (via nowwhere)

2 notes - 11 December, 2012

"Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me."

-Haruki Murakami (via loveyourchaos)

(Source: myamyabee)

1,917 notes - 10 December, 2012

"It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large. We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see."

-Anne Michaels | Fugitive Pieces

12 notes - 14 November, 2012

"I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself."

-Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (via the-professional-student)

5,362 notes - 9 October, 2012

"You ride as a man, fight as a man, and you think as a man -“
“I think as a human being,” she retorted hotly. “Men don’t think any differently from women - they just make more noise about being able to."

-Tamora Pierce | The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

9 notes - 19 June, 2012

"I think she did love me, for a minute, for a second, for the time it takes to remember, for the time it takes to forget. We had twenty-eight days together and then I was gone."

-The Stone Gods | Jeanette Winterson

- 9 May, 2012

"The writer improves only when he writes constantly. Like a caterpillar which eats up the leaves."

-Haruki Murakami (via amandaonwriting)

151 notes - 18 February, 2012

The Velveteen Rabbit

They stared at him, and the little Rabbit stared back. And all the time their noses twitched.

“Why don’t you get up and play with us?” one of them asked.

“I don’t feel like it,” said the Rabbit, for he didn’t want to explain that he had no clockwork.

“Ho!” said the furry rabbit. “It’s as easy as anything,” And he gave a big hop sideways and stood on his hind legs.

“I don’t believe you can!” he said.

“I can!” said the little Rabbit. “I can jump higher than anything!” He meant when the Boy threw him, but of course he didn’t want to say so.

“Can you hop on your hind legs?” asked the furry rabbit.

That was a dreadful question, for the Velveteen Rabbit had no hind legs at all! The back of him was made all in one piece, like a pincushion. He sat still in the bracken, and hoped that the other rabbits wouldn’t notice.

“I don’t want to!” he said again.

But the wild rabbits have very sharp eyes. And this one stretched out his neck and looked.

“He hasn’t got any hind legs!” he called out. “Fancy a rabbit without any hind legs!” And he began to laugh.

“I have!” cried the little Rabbit. “I have got hind legs! I am sitting on them!”

“Then stretch them out and show me, like this!” said the wild rabbit. And he began to whirl round and dance, till the little Rabbit got quite dizzy.

“I don’t like dancing,” he said. “I’d rather sit still!”

But all the while he was longing to dance, for a funny new tickly feeling ran through him, and he felt he would give anything in the world to be able to jump about like these rabbits did.

The strange rabbit stopped dancing, and came quite close. He came so close this time that his long whiskers brushed the Velveteen Rabbit’s ear, and then he wrinkled his nose suddenly and flattened his ears and jumped backwards.

“He doesn’t smell right!” he exclaimed. “He isn’t a rabbit at all! He isn’t real!”

“I am Real!” said the little Rabbit. “I am Real! The Boy said so!” And he nearly began to cry.

17 notes - 30 December, 2011

"He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."

Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | (via quote-book)

Your occasional dose of beautiful heartache.

(via lemonloveletters)

1,217 notes - 28 December, 2011

"Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance."

- Eduardo Hughes Galeano

12 notes - 1 September, 2011

"And sometimes, when an opposing black player commits a foul, or misses a good chance, or doesn’t miss a good chance, or argues with the referee, you sit quivering in a panic of liberal foreboding. ‘Please don’t say anything, anybody,’ you sit muttering to yourself. ‘Please don’t ruin it all for me.’ (For ME, please note, not for the poor bastard who has to play just feet from some evil fascist stormtrooper–such is the indulgent self-pity of the modern free thinker.) Then some neanderthal rises to his feet, points at Ince, or Wallace, or Barnes, or Walker, and you hold your breath…and he calls him a cunt, or a wanker, or something else obscene, and you are filled with an absurd sense of metropolitan sophisticate pride, because the adjectival epithet is missing; you know this would not be the case if you were watching a game on Merseyside or in the West Country or in the North-East, or anywhere that has no multiracial community. It’s not much to be grateful for, really, the fact that a man calls another man a cunt but not a black cunt."

-Fever Pitch | Nick Hornby

4 notes - 20 August, 2011

"I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."

-Sylvia Plath | The Bell Jar (via hergreenlight)

2 notes - 19 May, 2011

"‘If I had it to do all over again … I wouldn’t change a thing.’… the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation."

- Steve Erickson

5 notes - 29 April, 2011