This is what I believe to be true: You have to do everything you can, and if you stay positive, you have a shot at a silver lining.
Silver Linings Playbook
Editing is just like writing, except hateful, and in reverse.
Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out.
Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
You know what’s sad about reading books? It’s that you fall in love with the characters. They grow on you. And as you read, you start to feel what they feel - all of them - you become them. And when you’re done, you’re never the same. Sure you’re still you, you look the same, talk in the same manner, but something in you has changed. Something in the way you think, the way you choose, sometimes, even the things you say may differ. But it all comes down to the state you go to after a nice novel. The after-feeling. It’s amazing, but somehow, you feel left alone by that world you were once in. It’s overwhelming. But it makes you sad. Cause for once you were this, this otherworldly being in… Neverwhere, and then you suddenly have to say goodbye after a few weeks from when you read the last page. When you’ve recovered from that state it’s just… quite sad.
We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
Carson Mccullers
Once I asked a serial killer what made him
get up in the morning, and he said The people.
I am writing a book on how to write a book so I can learn how to properly explain why you look better with the lights on. I listen to a song but it doesn’t mention your name so I stop listening to the song. Your heart is noise pop. White noise is ghosts missing the streamers that fall from your ears while you sing in the car. Vermont is not far if you are already in Vermont. My cat looks at me and then walks away. He is named either after a famous musician or a body of water. There are so many words I refuse to learn how to spell. Still, I spell check your thighs after I bend you over my desk. I spell check the inside of your left ear while you bite yourself on the kitchen table. Prostrate. Today I am writing in grunts, I am playing in fonts. My chest hair is size 44 Comic Sans. My eyebrows are whittled away before I leave the mall. I have sat under the same sun as you for 25 years. Sometimes I have walked under the same sun as you. Once, I played tennis under the same sun as you. Repetition sun. Staccato sun. Wrinkled sun. I tell your skin that covers your clavicle We’ve got at least 53 more years of holding hands on a bench under the same sun. The sequel to this poem is John Cusack holding a boombox over his head under barely any sun. Fact: I want to kiss your nose even when I’m not inside you.
Please move to Vermont and break my heart, Gregory Sherl
The conversation between your fingers and someone else’s skin. This is the most important discussion you can ever have.
Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You