“ As I’ve often said, you can shop online and find whatever you’re looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren’t looking for.
Economist Paul Krugman Is a Hard-Core Science Fiction Fan | Underwire | Wired.com via Shelf Awareness (via housingworksbookstore)
If I had one billion dollars I would buy a small city and turn it into Hound Town. Shelter dogs only. There would be a dog bank, dog salon, dog In-N-Out Burger and a Redbox.
There would also be a shelter cat city (CAT TOWN USA) a few miles away. City wide free Wi-Fi.
Maybe I should start a Kickstarer…
I thought I was sick of “Call Me Maybe” cards until I saw this.
Wedding
No bridal gown.
No tuxedo.
Just Her
and Him
in plain clothes,
both skinny, famished, exhausted
by the months of intensive love
preceding their decision.They didn’t notice the clerk
or any witnesses.
They looked at one another in a trance,
in an immobile dance within.They fled right after the ceremony
—what ceremony?
They took a Chagall flight over the city.
They never returned.-Nina Cassian, from Take My Word For It
I got this quote from “The People” by Charles Bukowski. I fell in love with this section the first time I read it years ago. It’s such a powerful and versatile quote. Personally, it reminds me that you aren’t willing to put forth effort to change until you’re sick of what you’ve got, and you can’t keep on living the same way. When you’re ready to make that change for yourself, it doesn’t matter what you’re up against. If you want to change, you can make it happen.
I got this done by Mike at High Resolution Tattoo in Baton Rouge, LA.
One Twenty Five: exercise + sleep
looking back on the last few months i think it’s safe to say i wavered in and out of a rut (depression?). it’s easy to see that now. now that things are different. but back then i refused to admit it. or, even see it. i was absolutely okay, and 100% myself when people were around me. everything…
There is a temptation to say that poets and fiction writers are separate animals, like aardvarks and zebras, and that it’s pointless for an aardvark to try to gallop on the plains or a zebra to crawl down a hole, but I find myself growing hot under the collar when people lay down absolutes about the difference between the poetic and the storytelling soul. Charles Baxter, a fiction writer who also has published several books of poetry, but who describes himself as an ex-poet in his essay collection Burning Down the House, writes:
“The poets start the party and dance the longest, but they don’t know how to plug in the audio system, and they have to wait for the prose writers to show them where the on/off switch is. In general, poets do not know where the on/off switch is, anywhere in life. They are usually off unless they are forcibly turned on, and they stay on until they are taken to the emergency room, where they are medicated and turned off again.”
—Lucia Perillo, author of Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, from an original essay on Powells.com
Marks
My husband gives me an A
for last night’s supper,
an incomplete for my ironing,
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average,
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait ‘til they learn
I’m dropping out.—Linda Pastan, from The Five Stages of Grief
W. W. Norton: Life Advice from Anne Enright's Mother
- You should flatter people a little. You should at least try.
- If Joyce was worried about what his Mammy might say, he would never have written Ulysses
- Never use a big word where a small word will do.
- Cheer up, we’ll soon be dead.
- Never laugh at someone’s religion.
- Never humiliate a man in…
W. W. Norton: Facts About The Moon
The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
“ Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Oscar Wilde (via kalmiacedar)
