Black Ice

MATTHEW DICKMAN

All night it felt like I was
in your room,
the French doors opened out
onto the porch, the table
there, the yard there and the last
of the flowers there, all night
all I wanted was the vanilla shadow
of your fingers, the dark
candy of your armpits, the light
snow your feet seem to be,
and all night the night was very much
like a ship, though you will
hate the way I say this, a ship
that appears to be both
walking toward the coastline
of your hips, and slowly moving
away, all night
all the water in the world
felt as still as a teacup
wrapped in tissue and placed deep
into a box full of those white
pieces of foam
people call popcorn. This morning
I drank coffee with sugar
which I never do, and kept crying
which is something I tend to do
whenever I think I have
walked into your house
with a Japanese sword and cut you
in half while you slept.
Just thinking of you asleep
makes me want to pull every flower
out of the ground
and throw them onto your bed.
This is a hated world,
I know, and we are fighting the star
riddled, burnt out, sky
of our brains. I keep waking up
in a box made out of black
ice, and sometimes there's your voice
speaking in another language
and sometimes there's nothing,
but always a little fruit hangs
from a tree,
where I have carved my name,
and carved your name,
and carved a little note
out of my arm which always says
I'm sorry and love and sorry
over and over, each letter
spelling out my name, which, in the language
of last night means apologia,
or it means who do you think you are, you
are barely a man. All night
I wanted to sit at your table
and pour out the beer
into little Turkish bowls, and have all
the cuts that make up your body and mine
close up like a tulip in the dark and cooling front yard.

Cradling the Capricorn Heart

Every fibre in their bodies, reminds Capricorn the heart is a physical organ, yet as it provides the body homeostatic mechanics, it also pumps love, discontentment and yearning through their vessels -grey washing every logical framework, leaving them confused and uncertain. It is easy for Capricorn to become too one-sided, neglect their emotional fulfilment and eschew all romantic sentiment. Their ruler, Saturn, mentors harsh discipline and constant reminders of harsh reality, that, although the Capricorn will conform, deep within them, these individuals are hiding an intense need for appreciation, adoration and pure love. They will work tirelessly if only to gain the recognition of others, rarely receiving it in the form they need- legacy of Capricorn’s austere expression and surface level assertiveness. Their natural composure and tendency to avoid conversations with emotional undertones suggests their company is unlikely to gauge the screams coming from deep within their beings - ‘tell me I have done a good job,’ ‘tell me you appreciate my work’, ‘tell me you noticed..’. More than often, the people around them have no idea, of the childlike vulnerability and terminal isolation that Capricorn inside. 

Capricorn are exceptional at masking inner worries, anxieties and volatilities. Born with an inbuilt sense of self assertion and responsibility, these individuals feel they must remain consistent, stable and dependable, for the sake of what is their cosmic duty. People feel naturally inclined to rely on Capricorn for the sake of re-assurance, and this often leaves them feeling as though if they lost their dependability, they may have nothing else to offer. Even early on in life, the Capricorn was victim to an intense inner monologue, one that is quick to criticize, and remind them of their shortcomings. The fondness and admiration of others is the suture to the cutting critique, and yet, they experience so much trouble expressing this need. Capricorn understands adulation can come from career success, and will direct most of their energy into ensuring the revenue of corporate triumph. Materialism comes only from the need to fill the outside with the jewels and treasures that can be missing from the inside.

Capricorn prefer to deal with issues on their own, and are reticent about soliciting advice. They tend to feel vulnerable, and uncomfortable in deep conversations regarding themselves -although they want nothing more than to seek the approval of someone else. Often time, Capricorn feel unworthy of affection and devotion, believing they have not achieved enough to be recipient of the love they deserve. Naturally more oriented to work than pleasure, it is common for Capricorn to repress all emotion and sentiment until they have a logical composition to work through. The tendency of others to find comfort leaning on Capricorn for their support instils them with the fear that if they lose stability, everything around them will collapse.

I guess all I am trying to say is next time you see a Capricorn tell them you love them and they are so appreciated and loved. 

r u in love?'

paintdeath answered:

with movies,places,shapes,colors,shadows,memories. definitely

“

do you remember the first time you were called annoying? 
how your breath stopped short in your chest
the way the light drained from your eyes, though you knew your cheeks were ablaze 
the way your throat tightened as you tried to form an argument that got lost on your tongue.
your eyes never left the floor that day. 
you were 13.

you’re 20 now, and i still see the light fade from your eyes when you talk about your interests for “too long,”
apologies littering every other sentence,
words trailing off a cliff you haven’t jumped from in 7 years.
i could listen to you forever, though i know speaking for more than 3 uninterrupted minutes makes you anxious.
all i want you to know is that you deserve to be heard
for 3 minutes
for 10 minutes
for 2 hours
forever.

there will be people who cannot handle your grace, your beauty, your wisdom, your heart;
mostly because they can’t handle their own.

but you will never be
and have never been
“too much.”

”

—	"this started as something completely different, but everything comes back to you, doesn’t it?" - tyler ford

“I feel like so many girls don’t ask for what they want so they don’t get what they want. I know what I want and I’m just gonna ask for it. If you give it to me that’s so nice of you, if you don’t then fuck you I’m gonna keep asking until I get it. “Picky Bitch Checklist” is the anthem for bitches to stop messing with these boys that don’t give them shit. That don’t do anything for them besides for take from them. Hopefully a few numbers get deleted because of this song.”

—	Junglepussy on Pretty Bitch Checklist

“the closest ive come to poetry is talking to you”

—	10 word story // 9:23pm

“I’m self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900 per cent, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes.”

—

Bjork

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

—	Sylvia Plath

“Directly, or indirectly, everything we write is for someone.”

—

Unknown

“Three things occupied my mind;
Men, poetry and vomiting.”

—	Frieda Hughes

“Are you scared? Or are you not ready? There is a difference.”

—	Unique Quietness

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me—why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.”

—	From How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields

“I certainly admire people who do things.”

—	Raymond Chandler

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a very long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

—	F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

“

He was all slapped red cheeks 
and too short jeans.
I kissed him until his mother came home
and laughed at our backwards sweaters
and lack of breath.

He was all “pick you up at eight”,
see him at ten.
Loving him was a wait -
waiting for his car to pull up,
waiting for his call,
waiting for him to feel the same.
I thought he was saying “I love you too”
when he talked about knee highs and
his parents going out of town and
no one ever driving by the field by his house,
but all he was saying was
“I want to fuck you.”

He was all innocent curls and ’60s rock -
a mama’s boy that had not outgrown rebellion.
My thighs were another way to stick it to his parents
who, upon seeing us sucking the marrow out of each other,
winked and presented me with my very own
“daughter in law” nickname.
The poor boy.
The last thing he’d wanted was the hickey
I left on his neck to spell “forever.”

He was all timid shakes and coffee breaks
with never a penny in his pocket.
I shared my cup of frozen yogurt with him
in return for space in his bed.
A season with him was a hot period of
drunken insomnia and game shows.
Beautiful and full of late night loneliness,
but sad, so sad.
That boy spent hours staring at the sky,
willing himself not to cry.
His last text read:
The birds may know about the heaven
we look for with ladders,
but I’ll never know unless I jump.

I am all scars and broken parts,
a collapsed choo choo train that ran out
of steam months ago, but
somehow keeps chugging along
to toot my horn at boys on the street,
though my poor little heart tells me
it can’t bear the weight of yet
another passenger.

Choo choo, I say.
If you’re the boy pulling 
feathers out of your spine,
I’ve been looking for you.

”

—	Pulling Feathers | Lora Mathis

“

The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry… For, being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation — especially one on paper.

 

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

”

—	Joseph Brodsky on how to develop your taste in reading — a brilliant 1988 essay, all the timelier in the age of linkbait

“Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman’s politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle. Obviously this way of thinking has made feminism more acceptable because its underlying assumption is that women can be feminists without fundamentally challenging and changing themselves or the culture.”

—	bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody

“I don’t want people to matter to me too much. Sometimes it hurts too much to think about them. Ones you love who don’t love you, ones who are dead or hate you, ones who you think about but never get to be with. I like people but when I get too close, it fucks me up and I can’t get things done.”

—	Henry Rollins

“When you start to know someone, all their physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in their energy, recognize the scent of their skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and your body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.”

—	Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“One draws a magic circle around oneself to keep everything out that doesn’t fit one’s secret games. Each time life breaks through the circle, the games become puny and ridiculous. So one draws a new circle and builds new defenses.”

—	Ingmar Bergman, writer and director for Through A Glass Darkly (Janus Films, 1961)

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”

—	Saint Francis de Sales

“Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night?”

—	Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day

“When you are your own best friend, you don’t endlessly seek out relationships, friendships, and validation from the wrong sources because you realize that the only approval and validation you need is your own.”

—	Mandy Hale, The Single Woman

“…what we are practicing
is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.”

—	Tony Hoagland, from Self-Improvement

“I was young once, and I said, ‘That’s beautiful and I want that.’ Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great—well, that’s absolutely torturous.”

—	Philip Seymour Hoffman

““Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow DWYL as career advice upon those covetous of her success. 

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.”

—	Do what you love, love what you do: An omnipresent mantra that’s bad for work and workers.

advice for march
aries: don’t forget to breathe 
taurus: think it through
gemini: dot your i’s and cross your x’s
cancer: open your mind
leo: some assembly required 
virgo: smile!
libra: don’t sweat the big stuff
scorpio: cotton candy and rollercoasters
sagittarius: wait
capricorn: not too fast and not too slow now 
aquarius: tip toe
pisces: it’s all about you baby

“Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.”

—	Eckhart Tolle

“Take a shower,
Wash away the bad thoughts,
Cleanse your body,
Put on some relaxing music,
Get in to bed,
Breathe.”

—

Unknown

“I was 19 when I finally stopped opening the door for unrequited love.
I was 20 when I first learned that 
courage tasted like bitter wine and metal. Like blood and honey.
When I told you I loved you,
I screamed it. I let it rip
it’s way out of my throat, and 
it felt so good that I cried.
The other day, you walked by me
with your friends and I could feel the pity in your stare.
Don’t you do that.
Don’t you look at what I had for you and call it weak.
Not when you were the one afraid of it.
I stood there with my hands open,
my mouth bruised tender with supplication.
Don’t you dare treat me like a victim of my own emotions, like being
moved to my knees by love
was a mistake that I regret.
I will go to my grave with the memory
of the bravery in my bones.
I am not ashamed of any of it.
Not the closed door in my face
or the static silence of my phone
for weeks after.
I was not afraid.
I am still not afraid.
I will never be afraid again.
Bring in the beasts with teeth
like tree branches.
Bring in all the men who will never love me.
Bring in the monsters with
faces carved out of stone. 
I am not afraid. 
They can eat me alive.
I am not afraid.
I will cut my way out of their bellies.
I am not afraid.
Never again.”

—	Unrequited, Caitlyn S.

“I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed,
and tranquil, like a full cemetery.”

—	Yehuda Amichai, from I Have Become Very Hairy

“More than putting another man on the moon, 
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga, 
we need the opportunity to dance 
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance 
between the couch and dinning room table, at the end 
of the party, while the person we love has gone 
to bring the car around 
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart 
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance 
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people 
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant. 
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. 
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting 
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck. 
Your hands along her spine. Her hips 
unfolding like a cotton napkin 
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky 
are dead. The my body 
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody, 
Stairway to Heaven, power-cord slow dance. All my life 
I’ve made mistakes. Small 
and cruel. I made my plans. 
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine. 
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children 
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms 
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings. 
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him, 
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human, 
and when he turns to dip me 
or I step on his foot because we are both leading, 
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer. 
The slow dance of what’s to come 
and the slow dance of insomnia 
pouring across the floor like bath water. 
When the woman I’m sleeping with 
stands naked in the bathroom, 
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit 
into the sink. There is no one to save us 
because there is no need to be saved. 
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed 
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a shear white dress 
covered in a million beads 
comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, 
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out 
and bring her in. This is the almond grove 
in the dark slow dance. 
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping 
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance.”

—	Slow Dance, Matthew Dickman

“The story, it’s not linear, I don’t know if I ever make it to Paris. There’s nothing French about the album, there’s no Eiffel Towers in the video, the girl isn’t even French. It’s really a story about losing love, finding love, and trying to get it back again. It’s about that girl that you meet. She blows you away, you blow her away, y’all make love the first day, and then y’all just kind of leave it for what it’s worth. [You reconnect] and it’s that honeymoon phase, you’re with each other every day, every second. After a month, we’re about to go to the next city but she’s having to deal with everything that she’s heard about me. They say I’m selfish and she’s paranoid, and she says, I gotta do what I gotta do, and she’s very upset about it and it kind of breaks her heart, and it breaks my heart. Then I get a call a couple of months later, there’s a cocktail party in Paris and she’s there. And I happen to be in London and the airports are shut down. The only way I can get there is the last train to Paris. I don’t know if she’s gonna be there. I don’t know if she’s gonna look the same, or if she’s gonna be there with another guy, if I’m going there for nothing. That train ride is the definition of love.”

—	Diddy’s response to NYMag about the plot of ‘Last Train To Paris’

“

Like most girls, my daughter hears, “That’s a pretty dress, did you pick it yourself?” or “What lovely hair you have,” or “You have the most amazing eyelashes,” or “I like the bows on your shoes,” or “You are so cute” almost every time somebody engages in conversation with her. 

If family, friends, shop assistants, complete strangers, and even Santa only remark on how girls look, rather than what they think and do, how can we expect girls to believe that they have anything more to offer the world than their beauty?

”

—	How To Break The Ice With Little Girls That Doesn’t Involve Commenting On Their Appearance

Shyness mistaken for passivity, a general lack of initiative, what does it even matter, I really don’t know, certain things just are and peopleare and attitudes are and I’m afraid you can’t control your personal aura or sth nor can you change the way people will end up perceiving you whatsoever and well if that’s what they think of you that doesn’t mean you’ve got to prove them wrong or accept the “boring person” label and never come out of your house again. What I mean is: don’t take this crap seriously (unless it means anything to you to actually take it seriously, unless you feel like there’s a reason for you to take it seriously). You said it yourself; there’s such multiplicity in individual characteristics; such plentitude of ways one might use to express oneself and communicate oneself. And you’ll get judged alright. You’ll get to be judged irrespective of your own way of approaching people. It’s just what it is. Now let’s say you care just too much and naturally can’t stop thinking about it. Question is: do you feel you’re boring? And if that’s the case, what does it mean to you, do you find it restricting, does it affect you, can you handle the truth without merely enduring it, does it mean anything to you being boring? Screw the "why others…"part, focus on the "it somehow had access in my head so it’s vital that i do not let it slip away and begin to wonder about it without yet worrying about it" part. Self-observation. Soft, innocent self-observation; i say go for that. Not even a cheap “know thy self”; it’s not about knowing. It’s about noticing. Notice how much everything around you a) interests you b) affects you. If it doesn’t concern you at all, it means it has no access and if it has no access in either the head or the heart, it means it’s, at least temporarily, meaningless. Meaningless to you. And it’ll still be absolutely valid for you to go back to (over)thinking about it in the future but for the time being, you can at least opt for being as much honest with yourself as possible. You’re not bothering me, sorry for analysing this in such a lengthy way. I hope you’re doing good. 

“We are created by being destroyed.”

—	Franz Wright, from Letter, January 1998

“I am almost equal to a shadow.”

—	Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“She imagines him imagining her. 
This is her salvation.”

—	Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”

—	Salvador Dalí

“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfect, and work perfect, I can avoid or minimize criticism, blame and ridicule, the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame. All perfectionism is, is the 20-ton shield that we carry around hoping that it will keep us from being hurt”

—	Brene Brown

“…choose to believe in your own myth
your own glamour
your own spell
a young woman who does this
(even if she is just pretending)
has everything.”

—	Francesca Lia Block, How to (Un)cage a Girl

“Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am.”

—	Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through

“For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. 

So collapse. 
Crumble.
This is not your destruction. 

This is your birth.”

—

n.t.

“i need to be loved/ & havent the audacity
to say
where are you/ & dont know who to say it to”

—	Star Sign Quotes Capricorn Ntozake Shange

“Define loneliness?
Yes. 
It’s what we can’t do for each other.”

—	Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”

—	Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.”

—	Thomas Mann, from Death in Venice, trans. Henry Heim

“…her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”

—	James Joyce, from Ulysses

“i want you to know
this was an experiment
to see how selfish i could be

if i could stand not being wanted
when i wanted to be wanted”

—	From No Assistance by Ntozake Shang

“Still we insist on meaning, that common consolation
that, now and then, makes for beauty. Or disaster.”

—	From The Same Old Figurative by Joel Toledo

“It was a strange winter and nothing and everything happened.”

—	Gertrude Stein, from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.”

—	Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo

“Buy less, choose well.”

—	Vivienne Westwood

50. He’s Not As Complicated As You Are

Don’t go thinking that means you’re deeper than he is, though. Or smarter. He just likes to keep it simple. If you can understand and appreciate that, you might end up complimenting each other very well.

“I do not want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”

“Treat your friends like lovers, and your lovers like friends.”

—

Dean Spade Actual quote: “One of my goals in thinking about redefining the way we view relationships is to try to treat the people I date more like I treat my friends—try to be respectful and thoughtful and have boundaries and reasonable expectations—and to try to treat my friends more like my dates—to give them special attention, honor my commitments to them, be consistent, and invest deeply in our futures together.”

“All that day she had the strange feeling that she was taking part in a theatrical performance with better actors than herself and that her own bad performance was spoiling the whole show.”

—	Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“We choose someone to love only by not choosing to love millions of others…”

—	James Wood, in his introduction to Satre’s Nausea

The Benefit of Your Ascendant

• Rising Aries:You may not always feel like you have it together, but people will assume you do. The luxury of appearing confident when you may not actually be will help you out numerous times in your life.
• Rising Taurus:Finesse and aestheticism will follow you forever. Even if your personal style is thrown together or sloppy, people will be into it and look to you for creative inspiration.
• Rising Gemini:Many people will see you as a friend due to the way you present yourself and speak to others. You're responsive, witty, and somewhat detached when meeting people, even if that's not you 100% of the time.
• Rising Cancer:You can appear rather tough, but this makes people want to please you and be in your good graces. This is exceptionally helpful in attracting true and meaningful people in your life.
• Rising Leo:You're most likely someone who smiles a lot and will usually make a sparkly first impression. The feeling you leave upon others creates connections and helps you out greatly in your career.
• Rising Virgo:People will see you as put-together and graceful. You may even find yourself surprising people that you're more laid back than they assumed upon first meeting you. You usually fall into the reluctant leader position.
• Rising Libra:Friendliness takes you everywhere. You will draw many people toward you in your life and make many acquaintances wherever you go. But sometimes this could mean attracting the wrong kind of people!
• Rising Scorpio:Sex appeal and a sort of mysterious quality makes people want to get to know you. People will think you're interesting even when you feel particularly not. This will be more useful to you as you mature.
• Rising Sagittarius:You will be able to charm yourself in and out of situations, but the best part is that you're sincere and people see that. This will be your safety net in life.
• Rising Capricorn:You won't always make the best impressions, but people will respect you with ease and the loyalty that follows you will do so for the rest of your life, providing the comfort you seek.
• Rising Aquarius:Likable, funny, and not one to be messed with is how others will see you. Even when you're just in a so-so mood, it won't be off putting, and people will identify with you.
• Rising Pisces:People will come to you for help and trust you without any logical reason to. You will touch people with a listening ear and they'll always remember you--a quality that will be returned back to you.

“I listened carefully to doubts and revisions
of someone else’s life, safe in my room of tomorrow,
a passing witness to sorrow and wonder.”

—	From Someone Else’s Life by Kapka Kassabova

“My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards
sent from vanished cities,
and blackened with illegible script,
in which they discern words
like 'yearning,' 'illness,' or 'the end.
They marvel at dormant volcanoes.
They don’t desire light.”

—	Small Objects by Adam Zagajewski

“You wanted love and expected what?
A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star?”

—	From Handy Guide by Dean Young

“Only by a continual effort can I create. My tendency is to drift toward immobility. My deepest, surest inclination lies in silence and the daily routine…But I know that I stand erect through that very effort and that if I ceased to believe in it for a single moment I should roll over the precipice. This is how I avoid illness and renunciation, raising my head with all my strength to breathe and to conquer. This is my way of despairing and this is my way of curing myself.”

—	Albert Camus, from Notebooks

“I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed only of being a little pocket mirror, the sort that a woman can carry in her purse, one that reflects small blemishes, and some great beauties, when held close enough to the heart.”

—	Evocations of Love, Peter Altenberg

"everytime i write caprciorn i see this girl she is holding a balloon but its glass and it doesnt float like its only half inflated and she cant play or it will shatter and its fucked like all the other kids got bright malleable balloons and she has a hard glass one"

“I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterward, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear holes, the nosehairs.”

—	From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood

“Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language. A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up (this is, in fact, the generalized definition of the “grain” of writing) and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.”

—	The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes

“God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.”

—	Paul Valéry

““No te entiendo” which means “I do not understand you,” was a category in the Mexican casta system in early colonial history. I was researching the differences between the casta system in Perú and México, and when I came to that category, the idea that colonialists would classify someone as so “mixed” they were no longer anything other than a confusion, I laughed. This space of being not entirely understood because of what you are or what your interests are in, to be mistranslated because someone is unable to translate you, your body, your being… I like investigating that space. This is important to me, because I insist to see myself as an artist—to write, to make sound, to make video, to produce, to curate, to dance, to juggle identities confuses people. I also enjoy mistranslating, because words never truly mean what you expect them to mean.”

—	LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, in an Interview with Walker Magazine

“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.”

—	Chuck Klosterman (b.1972, American)

“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”

—	Albert Einstein

“Here is the riddle of love: everything it gives to you, it takes away.”

—	Alice Hoffman

“One reason that people have artist’s block is that they do not respect the law of dormancy in nature. Trees don’t produce fruit all year long, constantly. They have a point where they go dormant. And when you are in a dormant period creatively, if you can arrange your life to do the technical tasks that don’t take creativity, you are essentially preparing for the spring when it will all blossom again.”

—	Marshall Vandruff

“I know about the more in morphine, 
what it’s like to wake and feel 
like a chalk outline of yourself.”

—	From Oblivion Chiclets by Jeffrey McDaniel

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”

—	D. W. Winnicott

“my favorite relationships are ambiguous, unreciprocated or entirely fictional.”

—	From I Am Someone’s Dream Husband by Guillaume Morissette

“I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being—not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react.”

—	Persona (1966) dir. by Ingmar Bergman

“I suppose Edie thought of herself as a caterpillar that had turned into a butterfly. She had thought of herself as just another kid in a big, rather unhappy family, and all of a sudden the spotlights were on her and she was being treated as something very, very special, but inside she felt like a lump of dirt. Then when she was being paid less attention to, she didn’t know who she was. That possibility of destruction was built into the weakness of her personality. We have to get used to the reality that we’re alone. If you can’t get used to it, then you go mad. And she went kind of mad.”

—	Henry Geldzahler on Edie Sedgwick

“So raise a glass to teenage girls for their linguistic innovation. It expands our expressive vocabulary, giving us new words and modes of expression. Speakers may nostalgically look to a previous golden era of English, but the truth is that Shakespeare’s English is an abomination of Chaucer’s English, which is an abomination of Beowolf’s. Language is inherently unstable. It’s in a constant state of flux, made and remade—stretched, altered, broken down and rearranged—by its speakers every day. Rather than a sign of corruption and disorder, this is language in its full vitality—a living, evolving organism.”

—	Gabriel Arana, “Creaky Voice: Yet Another Example of Young Women’s Linguistic Ingenuity”

“ Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. ”

—	Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”

—	Frank O’Hara, b. 3/27/1926, Meditations in an Emergency

“A poem is not its words or its images, any more than a symphony is its notes or a river its drops of water. Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself. It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world. The work that a poem does is transfer of human energy, and I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions.”

—	Muriel Rukeyser, from an interview

“Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.

In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace
that she might have a story of herself to tell
in some other place.”

—	History by Jennifer Michael Hecht