Home

we were just pretending

"I guess I like that idea that you could pretend yourself into new feelings and new relationships. Obviously I'm a big pretender. but the kind of leap where it's almost like some kind of science fiction thing happens. Like we were just pretending, and then what's this? We actually have new powers now, and we see each other differently, and in fact all of life has suddenly tilted. I'm going for that everyday, personally."
~ Miranda July

Posts tagged "life"

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feel it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life.

Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

We all agree it’s too big to keep up with, that we’re surrounded by life, that we’ll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it’s empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.

Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

I love how it swells
into a temple where it is
held prisoner, where the god
of blame resides. I love
slopes & peaks, the secret
paths that make me selfish.
I love my crooked feet
shaped by vanity & work
shoes made to outlast
belief. The hardness
coupling milk it can’t
fashion. I love the lips,
salt & honeycomb on the tongue.
The hair holding off rain
& snow. The white moons
on my fingernails. I love
how everything begs
blood into song & prayer
inside an egg. A ghost
hums through my bones
like Pan’s midnight flute
shaping internal laws
beside a troubled river.
I love this body
made to weather the storm
in the brain, raised
out of the deep smell
of fish & water hyacinth,
out of rapture & the first
regret. I love my big hands.
I love it clear down to the soft
quick motor of each breath,
the liver’s ten kinds of desire
& the kidney’s lust for sugar.
This skin, this sac of dung
& joy, this spleen floating
like a compass needle inside
nighttime, always divining
West Africa’s dusty horizon.
I love the birthmark
posed like a fighting cock
on my right shoulder blade.
I love this body, this
solo & ragtime jubilee
behind the left nipple,
because I know I was born
to wear out at least
one hundred angels.

Yusef Komunyakaa, Anodyne

(via austinimus)

Listen! I will be honest with you;
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;
These are the days that must happen to you.

Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

There’s a quote from Whitman that I’ve always loved: “These are the days that must happen to you.” The idea behind it, in that weird, barbaric optimism of Whitman’s, is that everything that happens is a part of the grander story of yourself. And maybe that story’s mostly bullshit, and maybe you don’t particularly like the telling. But the good things that happen in life are only good because of the sadnesses and vice versa. The future is a place you’re just starting to explore, a house you haven’t moved into yet, and sometimes, you need to pull a ripcord before you get to cross the threshold. But the only way to get there is to plunge forward.

Todd VanDerWerff

Northern Exposure, “A Hunting We Will Go” Ending

“You know what I’d like to do? Dance.”

“Dance?”

“Uh huh.”

“Where?”

“Here, on my grave! It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, wouldn’t you say?”

Q: Drag every day or only on special occasions?
A: Isn’t it all drag?

The Warholian Questionnaire: Lena Dunham

“All of Them Are Burning” - Joy Ladin

Your present, your future, your path

from one to the other.
It’s not a bad thing, really.

What more do you need
than a little skin to cover your heart,
a little heart

to cover your losses, a little loss
to hold you in this place
that may not be a place

but is the only place you stand a chance
of finding a way to live.
You get credit for trying

to live when you never have,
for acting natural
when you are an unnatural act,

an impersonation of a person
you’d like to meet, have dinner with, strip
to some essential, attractive fact,

you get credit for refusing to be ashamed
of the act of imagination
that keeps you down here, rooting in the dark,

hurting yourself
and sometimes laughing
in creation’s basement.

[from The American Poetry Review (vol. 42, no. 1, January/February 2013)]

“You made a pact with witches and gods. I can show you how to steal that fire.”

“I don’t think Grandmother would like that very much.”

“I will tell you a secret: The gods like nothing better. They sit on their mountaintops and in their sacred places, waiting for us to be brave enough to live our lives. They weep when we don’t.”

Jacob Clifton, The Urges

(a fantastic self-published novel I just finished reading. Apparently it’s not available to order anymore, which sucks cause it’s amazing.)

life:

On this day in LIFE magazine — January 5, 1962: Lucy is back!