Bernard: Analysis. What prompted that response?
Dolores: I don’t know.
Tag: self
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot.
Jack Gilbert, from “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)
There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (via quoted-books)
A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.
He read contemporary American fiction, because he hoped to find a resonance, a shaping of his longings, a sense of the America that he had imagined himself a part of. He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed: nothing was grave, nothing serious, nothing urgent, and most dissolved into ironic nothingness.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (via quoted-books)
The useless days will add up to something… These things are your becoming.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: advice on love and life from Dear Sugar
I shrugged the memory of failure away. Everyone doesn’t have to live in a heap. Painters, writers, musicians are lonely people. So are statesmen and admirals and generals. But then, I added to be fair, so are criminals and lunatics. Let’s just say, not to be too flattering, that true individuals are lonely.
I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
secretive dreams 