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.
(via gthegentleman)
“you must write every single day of your life … . you must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads … . may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. and out of that love, remake a world” - zen in the art of writing, ray bradbury
(via books-and-coffee-lover)
“and now the old story has begun to write itself over there … isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” - o pioneers!, willa cather
(via grayskymorning)
“for it would seem— her case proved it— that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. the nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.” - orlando, virginia woolf
(via bluebirds-fly)
“when writers die they become books, which is, after all, not to bad an incarnation.” - jorge luis borges
(via booklover)
ruminations on how writers are so frequently drinkers
“if i knew words enough i could write you the longest love-letter in the world— and never get tired.” - head and shoulders, f scott fitzgerald
“maybe i’ve done a very bad thing in sitting down to write; there is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonourable.” the adolescent, fyodor dostoyevsky
(via misswallflower)
“personally i think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. when you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. you can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. but when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. when you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. and that’s where it becomes wonderful…” - the elegance of the hedgehog, muriel barbery
“and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. if only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.” - to the lighthouse, virginia woolf
(via booklover)
(via saddlebunny)
“my fingers obsessively wrote the name of my beloved up and down my arm or in my hand or on my knee. if i wrote his name a million times on my body, i believed he would kiss me … his name held for me the sacred resonance of those old testament words written in fire by an invisible hand. mene, mene, teckel, upharsin. i could not say his name aloud. i could only write it on my skin with my fingers without cease.” - the plague of doves, louise erdrich
(via gatheringkindling)
