January 2012
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“I have disappeared into my love for you - and I think you should either give me...”
– Charles Hunter
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“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With...”
– Carson McCullers (via psychotherapy)
December 2011
“I often used to dream about you — vivid dreams with clear-cut stories. In these...”
– Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (via align)
“it’s no use, he sees her; he starts to shake an cough
just like the old...”
– “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” by the Police. I just figured out what he was saying for the second line and I got so excited. I love lyrics like that.
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here is something
“Well, if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Khayyam.
thebookstheygaveme:
I was thirteen, he ten years older when he gave me the book. A slim volume printed on thick parchment paper, a poem written by a man with a name like a poem: ‘Omar Khayam’. Inside were verses in quatrains, and black and white line drawings that suggested rather than showed those lineaments of gratified desire more often sought than found by the very young. I wanted him to...
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Coelho.
thebookstheygaveme:
A few years ago, I read Paulo Coelho’s By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. I convinced my then boyfriend to read it because I myself was convinced that the story bore a ghostly resemblance to our own love story — a story that unbeknownst to either of us at the time, was approaching a grave ending. I made notes in the margins, highlighting passages I knew he would love...
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here is something
I want to run, again, but this time it’s more toward something than away.
Your arms were always closed, weren’t they?
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Vonnegut.
thebookstheygaveme:
We dated in high school when a friend set us up. Both of us were children who didn’t know what we wanted; our relationship lasted only a few months. A year later, around Christmas time, when we went our separated ways to separate colleges, we tried it again. The time, the relationship lasted years. We became best friends, in love, inseparable. We would try new restaurants....
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“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live; she read books as...”
– Annie Dillard, The Living (via thebronzemedal)
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“I bought some string cheese today that expires
on your birthday and thought to...”
– Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, April 6 (via grammatolatry)
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Duras.
thebookstheygaveme:
She gave me her copy just before moving in, telling me how it haunted her. She was studying abroad for the year, more exotic and energetic than anyone I knew. During the day she studied drama and in the evenings we’d read aloud, quietly. She let me see things through her eyes and we thought we were in love. I was too young to understand nuance, too dim to see how little...
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November 2011
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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
sadnesses:
lunch-poems:
BY MARY JO BANG How could I have failed you like this? The narrator asks The object. The object is a box Of ashes. How could I not have saved you, A boy made of bone and blood. A boy Made of a mind. Of years. A hand And paint on canvas. A marble carving. How can I not reach where you are And pull you back. How can I be And you not. You’re forever on the...
Cohen.
thebookstheygaveme:
It was a gift for my 29th birthday. We’d just slept together. and as I lit a cigarette he rolled over and handed it to me from his backpack. When I saw it I squealed, sat up in bed and clapped. He was proud of himself, I could tell; pushing back his shoulders and grinning ear to ear. He was a decade older than I was and constantly worried I’d leave him. He was consumed...
Ishiguro.
thebookstheygaveme:
We’d met on a summer human rights fellowship in Paris. She had a boyfriend; I couldn’t keep my mind off her. When we returned to the States — she began law school in New York, I stayed with family in Boston — we thought it was over. But I convinced her to let me visit her for one weekend in August. I took the Fung Wah Chinatown bus to Canal Street, where she picked me up....
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