Living alone,’ November whispered, ‘is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn’t overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.
Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest. 

(via thelibraryofminds)

Source: girlinabook

To touch a person … to sleep with a person … is to become a pioneer,” she whispered then, “a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many times to countries like that. I have learned how to make coffee in all their ways, how to share food, how to comfort, how to dance in the native ways. It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to … immigrate, you could say.
Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest 

(via thelibraryofminds)

Source: i-am-a-knife

When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us. We’ve been raised to question what we know, to discount and discredit the authority of our gut.

I want to know why. I regret whenever I abandon myself. But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here. It’s not the lips of a prince that will save us, but our own lips speaking.

I am growing beyond my own conditioning, breaking set with what was breaking me.
When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams
Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the other girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino (via malapropsbookstore)

“When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.  Maybe he had been turning towards her just before it was completely dark, maybe he was lifting his hands.  There must have been some movement, a gesture, because every person in the living room would later remember a kiss.  They did not see a kiss, that would have been impossible.  The darkness that came on them was startling and complete.  Not only was everyone there certain of a kiss, they claimed they could identify the type of kiss: it was strong and passionate, and it took her by surprise.  They were all looking right at her when the lights went out.  They were still applauding, each on his or her feet, still in the fullest throes of hands slapping together, elbows up.  Not one person had come anywhere close to tiring.  […]  Would he have kissed her like that had the room been lit?  Was his mind so full of her that in the very instant of darkness he reached for her, did he think so quickly?  Or was it that they wanted her too, all of the men and women in the room, and so they imagined it collectively.  They were so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in.  Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned.  What would it mean to kiss the lips that held such a sound?”

- Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

ardent, adj.

It was after sex, when there was still heat and mostly breathing, when there was still touch and mostly thought…it was as if the whole world could be reduced to the sound of a single string being played, and the only thing this sound could make me think of was you. Sometimes desire is air; sometimes desire is liquid. And every now and then, when everything else is air and liquid, desire solidifies, and the body is the magnet that draws its weight.

The Lover’s Dictionary, David Levithan
Of course, if I chose to be an optimist, there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch. […] Everything would happen suddenly, with simplicity and naturalness: after the long separate journey, unable to move an inch closer to each other, after having felt her as an alien being for so long, a prisoner of her parallel route, then the consistency of space, instead of being impalpable as it had always been, would become more taut and, at the same time, looser, a condensing of the void which would seem to come not from outside but from within us, and would press me and Ursula H’x together…and then the invisible line I was following would become a single line, occupied by a mingling of her and me where her soft and secret nature would be penetrated or rather would enfold and, I would say, almost absorb the part of myself that till then had been suffering at being alone and separate and barren.
The Form of Space, Italo Calvino

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