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
~ Miranda July
Posts tagged "writing"
This would actually be a legitimately useful thing for me to hang over my desk.
Neil.
(via thomdunn)
Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. 1811.
When I wake up just before dawn and hear the throbbing voices of birds as they echo against the silence, I am overpowered by yearning. When I ride in the dark on stark roads through dry, bald hills, I ache with desperate longing. I don’t know what I am longing for, maybe for some place of my own within these images, some place where I fit, instead of being the one human being still awake, the only thing moving across the hills in the arid darkness. Maybe that ache is loneliness. I haven’t found a name for the feeling yet, nor do I know exactly what awakes in me. But instinct warns me that it is too potent for me, that my soul is on the verge of cracking when I feel it that way. I cannot handle the sheer power of those wild emotions by myself. I have to find some way to share them. That is why I write. It’s instinctive. I just have to—because it is awake like lava in my blood, and sustains me.
Rachel Corrie, Let Me Stand Alone
This book was a big deal for me.
Carl.
(via thomdunn)
It’s like trying to summit Mount Everest, and you see your own bones along the way.
Karen Russell, on writing a novel (at a reading at Greenlight Bookstore tonight)
A page of Shelley’s first draft of “Julian and Maddalo”
I don’t buy into the “drunk writer” or “crazy artist” idea — I think we’re being sold those kind of things by a force that would prefer we shut up, for the betterment of the status quo — but I do think that, as an artist, you’re standing by the Door. You open it up, and let a thing through, one or two at a time. And just by standing near that door, you yourself become radioactive. In a way that has nothing to do with your anger or your authority issues: You just naturally are a certain amount of On Fire, all the time.
