When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.
—Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
“I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
—A.S. Byatt, Possession
I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (via bqrmagic)
(Source: bluesandbarebones, via bqrmagic)
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made.”
—Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye, that was the trouble—I wanted to kiss you goodnight. And there’s a lot of difference.
—Ernest Hemingway (via holy-shrimp)
(via espressoandknits)
GPOY.
The recent discovery of an unpublished D.H. Lawrence letter proves that he’s got your back, ladies. Writing in response to a misogynistic 1924 article titled “The Ugliness of Women,” Lawrence lay down the law:
The hideousness {the author] sees is the reflection of himself, and of the automatic meat-lust with which he approaches another individual…Even the most “beautiful” woman is still a human creature. If {the author] approached her as such, as a being instead of as a piece of lurid meat, he would have no horrors afterwards.
Thank you D.H. Lawrence, meat-lust warrior. (h/t Jezebel)
Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?
—Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
—Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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