apointoftruth

[apointoftruth]

Heart, repeat after me

I no longer need to be fucked as hard as the lies I told myself. Flesh slamming into flesh to prove I was impenetrable. I no longer need sweat and bruises to prove I am alive. I never jumped from city rooftops, fell into city lights. (I've realized)

The moon doesn't have to be full to for me to love it. Sharp scimitars can be loved, too.

  Make love to me.

You make me feel (I am) better than the worst things I ever did. This is new to me, but don't slow down. Sting me. Push me to sting myself

  If I am broken, rebreak me so I can stop growing at angles 

Against and away from myself. Take from me so I can relearn how to give. 

  Fit your edges into mine.

Curl yourself into a question mark around me So I can't run away from my answers.

  We were never beyond repair. 

  Inspired by Buddy Wakefield's "We Were Emergencies"

[apointoftruth]

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis

[apointoftruth]

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Clifton Fadiman

[apointoftruth]

A True Poem, by Lloyd Schwartz

I’m working on a poem that’s so true, I can’t show it to anyone.

I could never show it to anyone.

Because it says exactly what I think, and what I think scares me.

Sometimes it pleases me.

Usually it brings misery.

And this poem says exactly what I think.

What I think of myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about my lover.

Exactly.

Parts of it might please them, some of it might scare them.

Some of it might bring misery.

And I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them.

I don’t want to hurt anybody.

I want everyone to love me.

Still, I keep working on it.

Why?

Why do I keep working on it?

Nobody will ever see it.

Nobody will ever see it.

I keep working on it even though I can never show it to anybody.

I keep working on it even though someone might get hurt.

This is how my writing tends to go

[apointoftruth]

When I love, it will be forever.

The Sense and Sensibility: Screenplay & Diaries : Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film, Emma Thompson

[apointoftruth]

They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one’s heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,"The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[apointoftruth]

It's kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there's no continuity in people at all. like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult," and after that you're a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.

Before I Fall, Lauren Oliver

[apointoftruth]

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

[apointoftruth]

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity—it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

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I want to tell you about your heart—you’ve probably been neglecting your heart—and you don’t know.

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder Which, as they kiss, consume

Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene VI, William Shakespeare

[apointoftruth]

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape, and size in the world.

Ray Bradbury

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Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

Chocolat, Joanne Harris

[apointoftruth]

Blowing Wishes

If you asked her what she was doing, she probably would have told you nothing. It was nothing that she was in the park at midnight, just like it was nothing that she was alone. The things fisted in her hands were probably nothing too.

Her favorite pen, metal-barreled and sleek.

A scrap of tissue paper.

The thumbstone in her pocket.

The last item wasn't necessary, but she knew from her reading that three was a powerful number. 

Sniffling in the cold air, she shucked off her gloves and clicked her pen. She bit her lip, hesitating, and wrote

kind passionate loyal playful smart

on the tissue paper. Three wasn't enough, and four was death. The fifth was new, but she knew better now. 

After all, she didn't go to the park after midnight just to half-ass her wishing. Which was what she was doing. Wishing.

She clasped the paper to her chest, held it pressed to the thumbstone that had rubbed most of her worries away. Then she ripped it, tore it into a tiny mound of paper snow. She clenched it in her hand. 

Open your palm, the woman had said, then deep breath and blow. She watched the paper pieces scatter in the winter wind and disappear into the night.

Please, she said to the universe. Please, please, please.

[apointoftruth]

But we can’t live in the light all of the time. You have to take whatever light you can hold into the dark with you.

A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray

[apointoftruth]

You do not conceive a novel as easily as you conceive a child, nor even half as easily as you create nonfiction work. A journalist amasses facts, anecdotes and interviews with top brass. Enough of these add up to a book. A novelist demands quite different things. He has to find himself in his materials, to know for sure how he would feel and act and the events he writes about. In addition, he requires a catalyst — a person, idea, or emotion which coalesces his ingredients and makes them jell into a solid purpose.

Zelda Popkin

[apointoftruth]

Our contradictions. We are in such a hurry to grow up, and then we long for our lost childhood. We make ourselves ill earning money, and then spend all our money on getting well again. We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future. We live as if we were never going to die, and die as if we had never lived.

Paulo Coelho