Quotation/Poetry

[Krikket]

Love him too. I'm thinking of giving "Huckleberry Finn" another go...

Huckleberry Finn is one of the books that I keep on my shelf for repeat readings. It's that good

 

[TotalBabe]

From a man of many talents, Sam Shepard:

"When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in."

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[Pleco]

From a man of many talents, Sam Shepard:

"When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in."

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This reminds me of a quote from a soldier describing Ulysses S. Grant, which is my favorite description of anyone:

" Grant habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it."

 

[Vanyanka]

A Dream Deferred
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

 

[Vanyanka]

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
-W. Somerset Maugham

 

[Vanyanka]

Impropriety is the soul of wit.
-W. Somerset Maugham

@aveline @TQueen @kryssyy @TotalBabe

 

[Vanyanka]

Tolerance is another word for indifference.
-W. Somerset Maugham

 

[TotalBabe]

Impropriety is the soul of wit.
-W. Somerset Maugham

"Brevity is the soul of lingerie." - Dorothy Parker

 

[electrolyte]

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

 

[Vanyanka]

April 18
by Sylvia Plath
the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you
or that because of sleep infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves that because of these

and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops

a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight

 

[Vanyanka]

"Brevity is the soul of lingerie." - Dorothy Parker

You're my Dorothy Parker!

 

[Vanyanka]

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines
By Pablo Neruda (who is one of my favorites)

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

 

[Vanyanka]

All quotes from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I highly recommend this book mostly because the language is stunning.

“The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.”

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”

“Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”

“Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.”

 

[Vanyanka]

Alone With Everybody by Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

 

[Vanyanka]

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”

― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

@kryssyy @VGB W @WalkingEmphasis @Ducky

 

[Vanyanka]

“It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

W @WalkingEmphasis

 

[Vanyanka]

“This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom.

Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

 

[WalkingEmphasis]

“This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom.

Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

:heart:

 

[Vanyanka]

 

[ItsAmyTee]

The Cinnamon Peeler
By Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.