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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