valkryiewayne

[valkryiewayne]

“In the map of this sentence (which is her map) the Cyclops is not unlike a series of hills & she is a water diviner, or a young girl with both her hands up not singing hallelujah but offering to be some kind of weathervane, a thing for lightning to move through when she is out on her bicycle or walking to the store. At any given moment she throws her hands up & offers for something to take her.”

— Aracelis Girmay, from “On the Shape of the Sentence,” Kingdom Animalia

[valkryiewayne]

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[valkryiewayne]

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow - that, in short, we are all going.”

—

[valkryiewayne]

I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

[valkryiewayne]

Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1923–1927

[valkryiewayne]

“You want to know what it was like? It was like my whole life had a fever. Whole acres of me were on fire. The sun talked dirty in my ear all night. I couldn’t drive past a wheatfield without doing it violence. I couldn’t even look at a bridge. I used to go out in the brush sometimes, So far out there no one could hear me, And just burn. I felt all right then. I couldn’t hurt anyone else. I was just a pillar of fire. It wasn’t the burning so much as the loneliness. It wasn’t the loneliness so much as the fear of being alone. Christ look at you pouring from the rocks. You’re so cold you’re boiling over. You’ve got stars in your hair. I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you And never walk back out.”

— Nico Alvarado, “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls”

[valkryiewayne]

““All of us have a shell, a skin between us and the world that we have to break each time we speak to it. Sometimes I wished mine were thinner.”

Excerpt From

One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1)

Mark Lawrence

[valkryiewayne]

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.

Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

[valkryiewayne]

“My hair used to be so long, I imagined it was a rope. In dreams I dangled from towers of salt, rising from the sea. Black horses sang to me. God’s favorite girl, dirt and honey, held together with string.”

— Nicola Maye Goldberg, “La Salpêtrière” (via mirroir)

[valkryiewayne]

“Everything rough becomes delicate when you love it. More roses, more roses, more roses.”

— Juan Ramón Jiménez, tr by Robert Bly, from “Parsley Crown,” wr. c. 1916

[valkryiewayne]

“I should not have believed anyone who told me that I was capable of such love," said Prince Andrew. "It is not at all the same feeling that I knew in the past. The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness....

Leo Tolstoy // War and Peace

[valkryiewayne]

“When you get older, you notice your sheets are dirty. Sometimes, you do something about it. And sometimes, you read the front page of the newspaper and sometimes you floss and sometimes you stop biting your nails and sometimes you meet a friend for lunch. You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, 5 years ago. You remember your umbrella, you check up on people to see if they got home, you leave places early to go home and make toast. You stand by the toaster in your underwear and a big t-shirt, wondering if you should just turn in or watch one more hour of television. You laugh at different things. You stop laughing at other things. You think about old loves almost like they are in a museum. The socks, you notice, aren’t organized into pairs and you mentally make a note of it. You cover your mouth when you sneeze, reaching for the box of tissues you bought, contains aloe. When you get older, you try toner, you experiment with trousers, you experiment with real sexy outfits, you experiment with pin curls and darker hair and orange-toned red lipstick and you date people that look good on paper. You kiss them in public and feel only a little self-conscious. You never like them, although sometimes you really do. you think about safe sex and sometimes, kids. You think about plants, maybe succulents, or maybe even a cat? When you get older, you try different shampoos. You find one you like. You try sleeping early and spin class and jogging again. You try a book you almost read but couldn’t finish. You wrap yourself in the blankets of: familiar t-shirts, caffe au lait, dim tv light, texts with old friends or new people you really want to like and love you. You lose contact with friends from college, and only sometimes you think about it. When you do, it feels bad and almost bitter. You lose people, and when other people bring them up, you almost pretend like you know what they are doing. You try to stop touching your face and become invested in things like expensive salads and trying parsnips and saving up for a vacation you really want. You keep a spare pen in a drawer. You look at old pictures of yourself and they feel foreign and misleading. You forget things like: purchasing stamps, buying more butter, putting lotion on your elbows, calling your mother back. You learn things like balance: checkbooks, social life, work life, time to work out and time to enjoy yourself. When you get older, you find things like rejection hurt less and things like nostalgia hurt more. You watch people do things you want to do, and then you do some of those things too. Things start to feel like pins on a map. You watch landmarks pass and almost note them. You eat a taco from a food truck and be careful to dab the corners of your mouth with a napkin. You smooth your shirt down. You think about details, the details of how clean the beer cup is, how you need to put the dishes away, how she smells like a perfume you wore and how his teeth are perfect and aligned. You feel a little less downtrodden by things like routine and security and a little more appreciative of things like doing nothing, finding a friend, stretching on a big couch. You hear old songs and only sometimes do they gut you. You think about your future almost always, in both a thrilling way and a very very panicked way. When you get older, you find yourself more in control. You find your convictions appealing, you find you like your body more, you learn to take things in stride. You begin to crave respect and comfort and adventure, all at the same time. You lay in your bed, fearing death, just like you did.You pull lint off your shirt. You smile less and feel content more. You think about changing and then often, you do. When you get older, you barely notice it at all. Then, you are sitting somewhere you’ve been before, staring at the nothingness of the sky, and you feel the wind moving away from you, fast and almost impossible to catch.”

—

When You Get Older, thefrenemy (via themindmovement)

I want to read this later and appreciate it when I’m in a more focused mood

[valkryiewayne]

I grew up too quick and I still forgive too slow

Ex:Re // Romance

[valkryiewayne]

“Moons might rise and fall, empires wax and wane, even the stars come and go, but there are constants too, and though the story of our kind is ever-changing it is also always the same.”

Mark Lawrence // Holy sister

[valkryiewayne]

When his pet dog, Chopper, had been hit by a car, he had insisted on going with his mother to the vet’s. And when the vet had said, The dog has got to be put to sleep, my boy… He had felt sorry but he hadn’t cried and tears had never been close to the surface. His mother had cried but three days later Chopper was in the dim past to her, and he would never be in the dim past for Mark. That was the value in not crying. Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.

Stephen King // Salem’s lot

[valkryiewayne]

“Ducunt volentem fata nolentem trahunt.”

—

Seneca the Younger

The Fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling.

[valkryiewayne]

“It’s crazy,” she’d said, “but I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can’t think of a better way to go insane.”

Donna Tartt // The Goldfinch