forvagabondsfromclown

[forvagabondsfromclown]

I prefer to think that things would go on forever.

I have never confronted the death of anything, be it a habit, a phase, or a marriage, even when the end stood right in front of me, plain and inevitable.

--Eli shafak

[forvagabondsfromclown]

I didn’t know how to listen. I didn’t observe boundaries; I’d slip into transference. I didn’t believe in statistics or verifying theories. The postulate of one personality to one person always struck me as overly minimalist. I had a tendency to blur what seemed clear and to question irrefutable arguments–it was a habit I had, a perverse mental yoga, the subtle pleasure of experiencing internal motion. I would examine with suspicion every judgment, turn each one over in my mouth, until finally I figured out what I’d expected: not a single one of them was right, they were all fakes, knockoffs. I didn’t want to have set opinions, which were just excess baggage. In debates, I’d be on one side one time and the other the next–which I know never endeared me to my interlocutors. I was witness to a strange phenomenon that occurred in my mind: the more I would find arguments for something, the more arguments against it would occur to me, too, and the more I grew attached to those arguments in favor, the more alluring the opposition became. 

–Olga Tokarczuk, Flights (Trans. Jennifer Croft)

[forvagabondsfromclown]

New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

[forvagabondsfromclown]

Solitude

It’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.

[forvagabondsfromclown]

“Remaining attached takes hard work for most of us. It means allowing people to be obnoxious and stupid and also very boring at times. It means allowing ourselves to fail and feel impatient and overwhelmed. Remaining attached requires continuing to gently bend your bad habits into good ones without breaking yourself in half in the process. Remaining attached means working hard and noticing improvements you make and feeling very, very proud of those improvements. But remaining attached also means noticing fear, decline, warping, drifting, avoidance, anger, anxiety, and neuroticism as they sprout up everywhere in spite of your best efforts to ELIMINATE ALL OF THESE EMOTIONAL WEEDS FOREVER AND EVER!

You don’t get to clear your life of struggle once and for all. No one does. The best things sometimes become the worst things. Your fears will subside and then return. There is not one clear and easy path forward through any dark forest. You will have to invent new ways to navigate new terrors. When people say those terrors are behind them, you can envy their happy ignorance, but don’t believe in their easy answers, because real, sustained joy is never about permanent rest and comfort.

To feel palpable, sustainable, delicious, passionate love for this world, you must feel love for struggle itself.”

— Ask Polly, One Year Later: 'I've Been a Hot Mess, But I've Been Open to Miracles Anyway!'

[forvagabondsfromclown]

[forvagabondsfromclown]

"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."

- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity

[forvagabondsfromclown]

we are so obsessed with beauty that we forget that love has nothing to do with beauty. love doesn’t presuppose beauty: love creates it. beauty is a finite thing, love is not. beauty cannot come before love, but love makes anything beautiful. 

[forvagabondsfromclown]

Helen Oyeyemi, from “White Is for Witching”    

[forvagabondsfromclown]

sometimes I reblog stuff from people I’m not following and I feel like I walked into a store and just stole stuff and walked out.

[forvagabondsfromclown]

Amy Hempel, "Cloudland", Sing to It

[forvagabondsfromclown]

“Grief will keep you reaching back / for what is not there”

— Adrianne Kalfopoulou, “Poem in Pieces, a Log,” A History of Too Much

[forvagabondsfromclown]

It's rather funny actually the way life thinks.

It's under the impression that a gentle and the politest reminder to me, being still alive ,is corporeal pain in the middle of your chest rather than a smile on your face.

[forvagabondsfromclown]

Franny Choi, from "I Guess By Now I Thought I’d Be Done With Shame"

[forvagabondsfromclown]

Was becoming a reporter always been your dream? My dream? I’m not sure. I don’t think not living your dream means you’ve failed at life. And I don’t think living your dream means you’ve succeeded either. I simply want to do well at my job right now. That’s my current dream.

TWENTY FIVE TWENTY ONE (2022)

[forvagabondsfromclown]

“I have to have you”???

bonus:

[forvagabondsfromclown]

The Richmond Item, Indiana, August 19, 1922