Notes on Notes

Emily Dickens

-"... and I am out with lanterns looking for myself..." -I wish you a kinder sea. (in a Letter to Catherine May Scott (1848))

Vincent Van Gogh

-"... in fact, I have no real friend but you. And when I am in low spirits, I always think of you. I only wish you were here, that we might again talk together about moving together to the country..." -I wake great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away. -I confess I did not know why, but looking at the stars always makes me dream.

Louise Glück

-... I was not wild, not volcanic, I was rigid and self-protective; the form my self-protectiveness took was exclusion: that which I fear, I ignored ... (Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry)

Oscar Wilde

-A flower blossom for its own joy

Alison Malee

-Be so full that even if they take and take and take and take you can still be overflowing.

Jack London

-But I like it. Because it is bitter and because it is my heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

-Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. They walk and run.

Edith Wharton

-Each time you happen to me all over again.

William James

-For you, my dear Sister, this is the most important change in all your life. In some ways, it will be a great nakedness, in others a great freedom. I suppose you'll let Time slowly decide for you what to do. (William James' letter to his sister Alice James, following the death of Henry James (1882))

Salvador Dali

-Forever will be you and me

Ernest Hemmingway

-God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her (a farewell to arms) -she looked away. I thought she was looking for another cigarette. then I saw she was crying. I could feel her crying. shaking and crying. she wouldn't look up. I put my arms around her. (the sun also rises) -you are so brave and quiet, I forget you are suffering -the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist

Henry James

-High noon at midsummer! What a spectacle! There are no clouds in the sky, no waves in the ocean. The sun has all to himself. To look long at the garden makes the eyes water. (a landscape painter) -It was a perfect summer's day: I can say no more for it. (a landscape painter)

Ray Bradbury

-How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you? (Fahrenheit 451) -It was a pleasure to burn. (f451) -Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least you die knowing you were heading for shore. (541) -I'm numb and I'm tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I'd been out in a pouring rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or coat. I'm soaked to the skin with emotion. (the martian chronicles) -Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Aldous Huxley

-I am and I wish I weren't

Beau Taplin

-I am awfully sentimental. Of books, belongings, people, places. It matters very little how positive or negative the experience was. If it shared some meaningful time in my life, I'll have trouble letting it go.

Emily O'Neill

-I am cherry stained teeth, you are the absence of youth.

Anne Sexton

-I am torn in two but I will conquer myself (the civil war) -It is June and i'm tired of being Brave -I know that I died before - once in November -This November there seems to be nothing to say -the heart slips backward, remembering, remembering

Pablo Neruda

-I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. (Tonight I can write) -Love is so short, forgetting is so long. -Under your skin the moon is alive (Ode to a Naked Beauty) -You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea. Like time. In you everything sank. (the song of despair) -You are like the night, calmed, constellated. Your silence is star-like, as distant, as true. (XV) -I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees

Jack Kerouac

-I forgave everybody. I gave up. I got drunk. -one day I will find the right words and they will be simple -I didnt know what to say. I felt like crying, god dammit. everybody int he world deserves an explanation

Jonathan Franzen

-I guess my life hasn't always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just try not to think about certain things too much or else they'll brake my heart

Franz Kafka

-I have this vision: that I will finally come find you, scattered pieces of distance would not stand in the way. Not needing words; the barest of glimpses would suffice for me and you -Peaceful moon. I consist only of bones. -I am sitting on my bed. A storm is coming in, appropriately. A storm is always appropriate

Virginia Woolf

-I just missed you in a quiet, simple, desperate kind of way -the flower bloomed and faded. the sun rose and sank. the lover loved and went. -june was white. I see the fields white with daises, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. then there was wind and violent thunder. there was a start riding through clouds one night, and I said to the start, "consume me." that was midsummer

E. Lockhart

-I lie there and wait, and remind myself over and over that it doesn't last forever. that there will be another day and another day after that. one of those days, i'll get up and eat breakfast and feel okay

Uma Therman

-I still love the people I've loved, even if I would cross the street to avoid them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

-I want to kiss you, but I won't. it might get to be a habit, and I can't get rid of habits (flappers and philosophers) -I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again (my lost city) -angry, and half in love with you, and tremendously sorry I turned away (the great gatsby) -there are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice (the sensible thing) -his dark eyes took me in and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love (the love of the last tycoon) -I knew what was left of me would always love you, but never quite in the same way (the beautiful and damned) -"I wish the beautiful and damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. we ruined ourselves- I have never thought that we ruined each other" (in a letter to his wife Zelda, 1930) -i'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do. -I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity

Elliot Knight

-I was so desperate to be understood that I would grab people and shove them inside my heart - where they stuck out like splinters, and it would hurt every time I felt anything.

Junot Diaz

-I was staring at you and you were staring at me and right then it was sort of like love, wasn't it?

Charlotte Eriksson

-I was stressed and scared and I had to hurry to be someone, become something, do something. I was running and cursed myself when I wasted my time on things that wouldn't get me anywhere. It was work and it was money, and I was never where I was, always somewhere else in my head. Far away. (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles

L. M. Montgomery

-I wonder what it is like to be trapped in a word where it is always June

Tennessee Williams

-I'm not good. I don't know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody's good. (cat on a hot tin roof)

Clair Luisa

-I'm picturing us on rooftops in strange cities, with strange people, and us. Always us.

Lemony Snicket

-If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives.

David Leviathan

-It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love. (every day) -There has to be a moment at the beginning when you wonder if you're in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. (lover's dictionary) -There are all these moments you think you won't survive. And then you survive.

Francis Ha

-It's that thing when you're with someone and you love them and they know it and they love you and you know it. But it's a party and you're both talking to other people and you're laughing and shining and you look across the room and catch each other's eyes. But not because you're possessive, or its precisely sexual, but because that is your person in life and it's funny and sad but only because this life will end and it's this secret world that exists right there in public. Unnoticed. That's what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess.

Richard Siken

-Let's admit without apology what we do to each other. we know who our enemies are. we know (detail of the fire) -you see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back (glue) -it should be enough, to make something beautiful should be enough. it isn't. it should be (war of the foxes) -tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. tell me we'll never get used to it (scheherazade) -how much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into something else? before it's some kind of murder? (portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting light) -but there's this space between us, always this space between us (love from a distance) -I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything (war of foxes) -you could drown in those eyes, I said. so it's summer, so it's suicide, so we're helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool (crush) -mortal love? sure. lovers abandoned and desperate? longing and suffering? of course, of course. you want it to mean something. -even when I look away, i'm still looking -I sleep. I dream. I make up things I would never say. I say them quietly. -someone has to leave first. this is a very old story. there is no other version. -do we simply stare at what's horrible and forgive it? -I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. i'd rather quit. i'd rather be sad. it's too much work. -but tell me you love this, tell me you're not miserable/

Leo Tolstoy

-Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand. (anna karenina) -He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. (anna Karenina) He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace. (the death of ivan itch -Everything I know, I know because of love. What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. -He stepped down, trying not to look at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. -Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Nathanial Hawthorne

-No summer ever came back and no two summers ever alike. Times change and people change. (The Blithedale Romance) -Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed

Rupi Kaur

-People go but how they left always stays.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

-Something in my soul was rising, rising, ceaselessly, painfully, and refused to be still. (notes form underground) -You smile at the extravagance of your dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity contained some real idea, something that belongs to your true life, - something that exists, and has always existed, in your heart. You search your dream for some prophecy that you were expecting. (the idiot) -I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair... because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering. And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live 0 that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea... (white nights) Which is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better? (notes form underground) -Your worst sin is that you destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.

Mary Oliver

-Tell me- what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? (the summer day) -august of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sun and the lilies again are spread across the water (the pond) -I want to think again of dangerous and noble things (the exponent) -but my bones knew something wonderful about the darkness ("wings," house of light) -but mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing -I was sad all day and what not. there I was, books on both sides of the table, papers stacked up, words falling off my tongue

W. Somerset Maugham

-The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure. (the summing up) -Nothing in this world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely, we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. (The razor edge) -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 of the cross of life. -Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities I hadn't got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn't. -We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if we weren't perhaps we should be less wise at fifty.

Walt Whitman

-There are days that must happen to you -We were together. I forget the rest. -I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

Caddy Compson

-There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me. (the sound and fury)

Alix Kates

-To the one with her head out of the window, drinking the rain.

George Orwell

-We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness.

James Joyce

-We'll meet again, we'll part once more. -"He thought he was sick in his heart, if you could be sick in that place" -

Elie Wiesel

-Why do I write. Perhaps in order to not go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness. (the function of madness)

Atticus

-You deserve to be the person you were meant to be.

Kyle Eschenroeder

-You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

George Elliot

-You talk as if you had never known any youth. It is monstrous - as if you had a vision of Hades in your childhood (middle march) -

Charles Dickens

-and oh, there are days in this life worth life and death (our mutual friend) -you are in every line I have ever read (great expectations)

Vladimir Nabokov

-and the rest is rust and stardust (lolita) -and presently, I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears (lolita) -I am weeping, drunk off the impossible past -and there were times when I knew how you felt and it was hell to know it -perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again

Edgar Allen Poe

-at midnight, in the month of june, I stand beneath a mystic moon (the sleeper) -and so, being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy -here I opened wide the door; - darkness there, and nothing more

Unknown

-but i'm never going to know what his skin feels like against mine, or what he likes in his coffee. and I wonder why I love a stranger with all my heart, and why someone who doesn't even know my name means more to me than I mean to myself -the sky was as pretty as your eyes tonight - i'm learning to be okay on my own -**** you - I am worth it. and **** you for making me feel for the slightest second that i'm not -today I saw your face and I lost my mind a little but I didn't collapse like I would have 6 months ago. (I still miss you sometimes but i'm not drowning anymore. and maybe they were right when they said it gets better) -I remember the first time you held my hand. I don't know if it was the cold or the fact that I loved you but **** 0 I felt the world rush through my veins -i'm sorry to all the people I hurt while I was hurting -all I really want is to get lost in a beautiful city and fall in love. fall in love with myself, with a cafe, with the boy across the street staring at me. I want to feel the sun on my skin and I want to feel happiness in my veins -I did not get to be mad and it's not fair it's not fair it's not fair I did not get to yell. I got to sit in silent tears" -do you know how much thinking and feeling i've done? and nothing's come of it. -I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit -"reminds me of a girl I loved" -the future is so close and I am so scared -you claim you love her, inside and out. but the only time you call her beautiful is when it's 3 Am and i've already turned you down -i'm going mad and nobody knows it. and I can't stop it, it's hopeless trying, and tomorrow I will go and sit like a fool in that darkness -I want to let you go but there's comfort in the panic -the honest to God truth is that i'm mad at myself. I should have known better -not a day passes that I don't see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we first met. every day I see that. -I don't have enough in me for everything that is unrequited -there are symphonies in my head screaming: it is going to get better I want time to be in love with everything -now go to sleep. count stars. think of the quietest things. -And what about all the good things I have in my heart - do they mean nothing? -I'm so scared that the rest of my life is going to feel like this. -When I was packing to leave, I took the curtains down and let the light into our bedroom for the first time in months. It almost looked like nothing bad had ever happened there. -A birthday cake that says /you'll always think about the people you've hurt/ -I never fell in love, not really. But you were the closest. With you, I was so close. -was that youth? That clear sapphire snow? -Drown me in October winds -I am alone in my room, between two worlds. -Stop waiting for it to make sense. Stop using that as an excuse to leave the door open. It's not closure you're seeking, it's this hope that despite what's gone wrong, everything can go back to normal. -Searching for something to numb the pain. I'm tired of pretending it doesn't hurt. -Yes, I was a fool, but I was in love. And I thought I was suffering the greatest misery I had ever known. I would not have it any other way. -A book titled: how to feel the way you felt before you knew what you know now. -Here it is, the dark thing, the dark thing you have waited for for so long -I hope it's love. I'm trying really hard to make it love. -My exhaustion stems from either crying to the moon, or wishing you were beside me. Either way, there will be no sleep tonight. -You still dream about the people lost in your memory, fabricated by your nostalgia and romanticized by your broken heart. -I think about you at midnight. And also, always. -Of course, of course I pretend not to think about how - maybe - maybe it could've been different. Most of the time, when I think that I have a drink, and then a few more, and then I write you a letter, and then I throw it in the fire. Because writing it does me good, and reading it would do you none. -I lost my youth to mental illness and those are years I'll never ****ing get back and it's not poetic it's ****ing devastating -When you said you saw the stars in my eyes, I wondered if you would ever be able to get the taste of moon out of your mouth. -You write because it's an adventure to watch it come out of your hands. -He had left the door at the end of the hall open. Through it the light airs of the summer night drew, vague, disturbing. -Life's hell anyway, but if there is any fun to be got out of it, you're only a ******* fool if you don't get it.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

-do you really think you're the only person alive who is unforgivably flawed? who's been hurt almost to the point of breaking?

John Steinbeck

-do you take pride in your hurt? does it make you seem large and tragic? (east of eden) -maybe everybody in the whole damn world is scared of each other. (of mice and men) -can you love a dishonest thing?

Jonathan Tropper

-even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

Kurt Vonnegut

-here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. there is no why (slaughterhouse five) -everything was beautiful and nothing hurt -but she did look back. and I loved her for that. because it was so human. so she turned into a pillar of salt. so, it goes. people aren't supposed to look back. i'm certainly not going to do it anymore. -there is no peace i'm sorry to say. we find it, we lose it, we find it again, we lose it again. -I still catch myself feeling bad about things that don't matter anymore. -these years weren't lost, they simply weren't planned

Warsan Shire

-his eyes were the same color as the sea in a postcard someone sends you when they love you, but not enough to stay -later that night, I held an atlas in my lap, ran my fingers across the whole world, and shivered, "where does it hurt?" it answered everywhere, everywhere, everywhere

Kate Morton

-it's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

Chris Cadle

-maybe we'll meet again when we are slightly older and our minds are less hectic. and i'll be right for you, and you'll be right for me

Cheryl Strayed

-most things will be okay eventually. but not everything will be. sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. acceptance is a small, quiet room.

Dan Campbell

-no matter how good things are, there will always be solitary nights you spend in your bedroom or car or in a party full of your closest friends when it feels like the walls are caving in

Sylvia Plath

-please don't ask me who I am -I shut my eyes and the music broke over me like a rainstorm -I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still -the moon, also, is merciless -I talk to God, but the sky is empty and orion walks by and doesn't speak -I just sat there with the whole summer turning sour in my mouth -I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me -in march i'll be rested, caught up and human -August rain: the best of summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. the odd uneven time

J.D. Salinger

-she wasn't doing anything that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together (a girl I knew) -I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. she knocked me out though. (catcher in the rye) -I hope that one day - preferably when we're both drunk - we can talk about it -i'll read my books, and i'll drink my coffee, and i'll bolt the door -I have so much to tell you and nowhere to begin -I wasn't tired or anything, I just felt blue as hell

William Faulkner

-some days, in late August at home, are like this. the air thin and eager like this. with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar... (the sound and fury) -how often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home? (as I lay dying) -I was wrong. I admit it. I believed that there were things which still mattered just because they had mattered once. but I was wrong. nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive. (Absalom, absalom) -...endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason, or hope of reward - and then endure -given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain

Albert Camus

-sometimes, at night, I would fall asleep open-eyed underneath a sky full of stars -and sometimes we exist then, there, in those strange moments where you imagine being nothing

Charles Bukowski

-there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we wait and wait in that space -looking at her at the bar, she's the best thing in sight: silent, blazing, nowhere -I want so much that is not here and I do not know what to do -I stepped out for a smoke and it's obvious the world is ending. someone let the poets out and they're eating all the birds -it's when you hide things that you choke on them -we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to her talk, I wasn't so sure

C. S. Lewis

-to love at all is to be vulnerable.

Haruki Murakami

-what I want is for us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like passing on the street, or getting on the same bus

Anne Frank

-what a wonderful thought that some of our best days are ahead of us

Mitch Albom

-why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all that noise?

Jonathan Safran Foer

-why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time? My greatest regret is how much I believed in the future. -Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

Ben Marws

I love sentences that instantly hit my bloodstream and derange me. When I read Kafka, I feel strangeness and beauty, I feel sorry. It's inventive, and yet the invention is tethered to a deep, plunging feeling. These are the important values to me; when something other-worldly gets its hooks in you emotionally. (what it really means to be "Kafkaesque"

Maram Rimawi

Let November be the start of everything beautiful.

-Anaïs Nin

Passion gives me moments of wholeness.

Amanda Lovelace

The pain did not make me a better person. It did not teach me not to take anything for granted. It did not teach me anything except how to be afraid to love anyone.