Op. 23 No. 5

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.

Poll of the day goes: if you love an artform long enough, you also start with it yourself. So I'd like to ask, do you write books, started on one, written several? "Quote yourself! If you can't, you have never said anything of value". (And if you haven't figured out where to publish it, try lulu.com)

Hello there

Long time lurker, first-time poster, in love with Patrick Wolf etc etc. Now we've got those formalities out of the way, can anybody tell me what the hell Patrick is saying in this video? It is annoying the hell out of me. Oh Patrick, why do you tease us so?

Never mind, it's been 'removed by the user' according to Youtube. Even more infuriating.

I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now? ...

I have taken you into myself, whole.  You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved.

(Letter to June Mansfield)

It turned out that superhuman vampire strength came in handy when shaving a thirty-five pound cat. After a couple of false starts, which had them chasing Chet the huge shaving-cream-covered cat around the loft, they discovered the value of duct tape as a grooming tool. Because of the tape, they weren't able to shave his feet. When they were finished, Chet looked like a big-eyed, potbellied, protohuman in fur-lined, duct-tape space boots - the feline love child of Gollum and Dobby the house-elf

"…I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more."

"You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs."

"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."

"We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need."

Beyond watching eyes
With sweet and tender kisses
Our souls reached out to each other
In breathless wonder

And when I awoke
From a vast and smiling peace
I found you bathed in morning light
Quietly studying
All the messages on my phone

''On the shelves, medical references, and meditations, certainly, but also the books that now filled the cubbyhole in the bungalow attic-the eighteenth-century poetry that had almost persuaded him he should be a landscape gardener, his third-edition Jane Austen, his Eliot and Lawrence and Wilfred Owen, the complete set of Conrad, the priceless 1783 edition of Crabbe's The Village, his Housman, the autographed copy of Auden's The Dance of Death. For this was the point, surely: he would be a better doctor for having read literature. What deep readings his modified sensibility might make human suffering, of the self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck that drive men toward ill health! Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall-this was the doctor's business, and it was literature's too.''
          
               ~Atonement- Ian McEwan

One day when I had the route, the man-who-holds-his-hand-out was half a block up the street. He was talking to a neighbor, looked back at me more than a block away and knew he had time to walk back and meet me. When he turned his back to me, I began running. I don't believe I ever delivered mail that fast, all stride and motion, never stopping or pausing, I was going to kill him. I had the letter half in the slot of his box when he turned and saw me.

"OH NO NO NO!" he screamed, "DON'T PUT IT IN THE BOX!"

He ran down the street toward me. All I saw was the blur of his feet. He must have run a hundred yards in 9.2.

I put the letter in his hand. I watched him open it, walk across the porch, open the door and go into his house. What it meant somebody else will have to tell me.

I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low meloncholy wailings of his violin, and knew he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel.

 A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds.  Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. 

It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back.  And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. 

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. 

And, alas, it's seldom successful.

I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to chose where we come from, we can still chose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we try to feel okay about them.

 

Some kids look at me strange in the hallways because I don't decorate my locker, and I'm the one that beat up Sean, and cried about it after he did it. I guess I'm pretty emotional.

 

We accept the love we think we deserve.

 

And in that moment, I swear, we felt infinite.

 

He's a wallflower.

 

I hope it's the kind of second side that he can listen to whenever he drives alone and feel like he belongs to something whenever he's sad. I hope it can be that for him.

 

I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.

 

Girls are weird, and I don't mean that offensively. I just can't put it any other way.

 

I look at people holding hands in the hallways and I try to think about how it all works. At the school dances, I sit in the background, and I tap my toe, and I wonder how many couples will dance to "their song." In the hallways, I see the girls wearing the guys' jackets, and I think about the idea of property. And I wonder if anyone is really happy. I hope they are. I really hope they are.

 

Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.

 

It was the kind of kiss that I could never
tell my friends about out loud. It was the
kind of kiss that made me know that I was
never so happy in my whole life.

 

So, this is my life.
And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and

I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.