“if you love someone— there is no possible harm in saying so … it sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another— but that does not make your feeling less valuable or good.” - a life in letters, john steinbeck
(via bookendsanddaisies)
“he knew that i love you also means i love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, i love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, i love you in a way that i love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.” - everything is illuminated, jonathan safran foer
(via pureblyss)
“in the end, what you do isn’t going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.” - john green
(via loveistodismissyourfears)
“but i was in search of love in those days, and i went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, i should find that low door in the wall, which others, i knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that gray city.” - brideshead revisited, evelyn waugh
(via pureblyss)
“the woman never lived yet who could cast a true-love out of her heart because the object of that love was unworthy of her.” - no name, wilkie collins
(via pureblyss)
“women can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money’ but they cannot resist a man’s tongue, when he knows how to talk to them.” - the woman in white, wilkie collins
(via gthegentleman)
the book thief, markus zusak
(via thebooker)
“‘now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.’ this word deep is an awfully interesting greek word. the more i studied it, i realized what it really means is to be stretched to the limit. it’s actually a distance-running word. it’s used to describe Jesus in the garden. you know, just about at the end of his tether. the word to love one another deeply really means to love one another strenuously. what does that mean?
it’s very much like running. one of the weird things about physical exercise is the more you do it, in general, the more strength you feel, but in the short run, you feel like you want to die. that’s what exercise is all about. it’s so odd that the very thing that gives you, overall, more energy, and more strength, and more power in the long run, in the short run drains you. same thing with love. what the ironic thing is if you don’t drain yourself through exercise, the lack of exercise will drain you.”
loving deeply (sermon), tim keller
(via onlylulu)
“you spend a lot of time building walls. it’s natural to want to see if someone is clever enough to climb over them.” - hannibal (2013)
(via gthegentleman)
Lots of things might happen. That’s the thing about writers. They’re unpredictable. They might bring you eggs in bed for breakfast, or they might all but ignore you for days. They might bring you eggs in bed at three in the morning. Or they might wake you up for sex at three in the morning. Or make love at four in the afternoon. They might not sleep at all. Or they might sleep right through the alarm and forget to get you up for work. Or call you home from work to kill a spider. Or refuse to speak to you after finding out you’ve never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. Or spend the last of the rent money on five kinds of soap. Or sell your textbooks for cash halfway through the semester. Or leave you love notes in your pockets. Or wash you pants with Post-It notes in the pockets so your laundry comes out covered in bits of wet paper. They might cry if the Post-It notes are unread all over your pants. It’s an unpredictable life.
But what happens if a writer falls in love with you?
This is a little more predictable. You will find your hemp necklace with the glass mushroom pendant around the neck of someone at a bus stop in a short story. Your favorite shoes will mysteriously disappear, and show up in a poem. The watch you always wear, the watch you own but never wear, the fact that you’ve never worn a watch: they suddenly belong to characters you’ve never known. And yet they’re you. They’re not you; they’re someone else entirely, but they toss their hair like you. They use the same colloquialisms as you. They scratch their nose when they lie like you. Sometimes they will be narrators; sometimes protagonists, sometimes villains. Sometimes they will be nobodies, an unimportant, static prop. This might amuse you at first. Or confuse you. You might be bewildered when books turn into mirrors. You might try to see yourself how your beloved writer sees you when you read a poem about someone who has your middle name or prose about someone who has never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. These poems and novels and short stories, they will scatter into the wind. You will wonder if you’re wandering through the pages of some story you’ve never even read. There’s no way to know. And no way to erase it. Even if you leave, a part of you will always be left behind.
If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.
“tomorrow morning, remember that the love of God is not grounded in your feelings, nor in your performance, and not even in your love for Him. His love is grounded in His own faithfulness.” - healing for damaged emotions, david seamands
(via search-my-s0ul)
“looking up at the stars, i know quite well
that, for all they care, i can go to hell,
but on earth indifference is the least
we have to dread from man or beast.
how should we like it were stars to burn
with a passion for us we could not return?
if equal affection cannot be,
let the more loving one be me.
admirer as i think i am
of stars that do not give a damn,
i cannot, now i see them, say
i missed one terribly all day.
were all stars to disappear or die,
i should learn to look at an empty sky
and feel its total dark sublime,
though this might take me a little time.”
the more loving one, wh auden
(via pureblyss)
“that’s why i like you … you are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.” - the fault in our stars, john green
(via pureblyss)
(via bookendsanddaisies)
“at the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘i’ and ‘you’ are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.” - civilization and its discontents, sigmund freud
(via museofagypsysoul)
