To be just, to be fair, and to be bold, was to be a woman. To be a survivor, was to be a Stark.
(Source: naevia, via tonystaarks)
“I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.”
— Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953 (via zombiebondage)
(Source: kitty-en-classe, via dreamingforfreedom)
c.k.
“Don’t ever cheat on someone. I’m serious. It’s not worth it. And I’m not saying this because cheating is morally wrong, because some people have a very specific version of morality that doesn’t necessarily classify actions as right or wrong. The reason you should never cheat on someone is because you won’t enjoy it. No matter which person you’re with, you’ll always be thinking of the other one. You will never be in the romantic present tense; your mind will solely exist in the past and the future. Let’s say you sleep with your mistress on Friday and your wife on Saturday: To an epicurean, this is the dream lifestyle. This is sexual utopia. But it never works out that way. When you’re having sex with your mistress on Friday, you will find yourself thinking about your wife. You will be thinking about how this act will destroy her, and how humiliated she would feel if she knew the truth. But then on Saturday, when you’re back in the arms of your trusting wife, your mind will immediately drift toward decadence. At the height of your physical passion, you will think back to how exciting things were 24 hours ago, when you were with a new, strange body. Except that it wasn’t exciting to be with someone else; it’s only exciting in your memory (at the time, it just made you wracked with guilt). So now you’re having sex with someone who loves you, but your mind isn’t even in the same room. And suddenly it’s Sunday; you have now had sex with two people on two consecutive nights, and you didn’t appreciate either episode. Algebraically, a + b = c and a + c = b. The only thing infidelity does is remind you of the people you’re not having sex with, which is something you can just as easily think about when you’re completely alone.”
“It gets worse because Diane did something two months ago that is unforgivable (I’m not going to elaborate on this, but feel free to fabricate any scenario you’re comfortable with). Now, in the weeks that have passed since this event, I have told her countless times that I forgive her for what she did. But I have been lying, both to her and to myself. So even though I feel like I love her, part of my brain resents her with an unspeakable ferocity. That resentment has changed the way I feel about everything. Now, whenever I feel love, I unconsciously feel grains of rage. And it is becoming harder and harder for me to differentiate between those two emotions.
So - clearly - I am not psychologically flawless.”:
“It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much.
It was a mistake coming here. I’m better off remembering things alone.”
“My conservative North Dakotan acquaintance is among the most ambitious people I’ve never met. He travels the world, he seems to have little problem meeting women who aspire to give him blowjobs, and he’s made himself independently wealthy. He is a workaholic, and that is a conscious decision. And midway through our second beer, he admits the one thing I’ve always known about him - that he is utterly and hopelessly depressed. “I want my life to be different,” he tells me, and his voice sounds as lonely as Morrissey’s on Bona Drag. “I want adventure. I want something to look forward to.”
“That’s what we all want,” I say in response. But here’s the problem: My friend is telling the truth, and I’m lying.”
“In my mind, I am in three different beds with three different women, and Diane is having unmatchable sex with a faceless stranger who does not exist. In reality, I am alone in the dark, afraid to make a phone call to a woman who is probably asleep.
I can still hear the rain, but I want it to be louder. I want it to keep me awake.
It’s never rainy enough.”
“When someone wants to talk about a dream, you can never say, “I don’t care.” You have to care. You just have to stand there and listen, because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation. It is a way for people to be honest without telling the truth. It’s the same situation with people who need to give you a detailed account of what they were doing on September 11. You can’t say, “I don’t care.” You have to care.”
“The voices inside my head never make me want to kill my mother. However, they sometimes make me want to kill myself.”
“There are so many things that will never happen to me again, and I never even noticed when those things stopped occurring. And this does not mean I wish I had my old life back, because I like my new life better; I was just shocked to discover how much of what used to be central to my existence doesn’t even matter to me anymore.”
“Tomorrow, I will take a shower and leave before her digital clock reads 9:05 A.M. We will exchange cordial good-byes. Later that day, Lenore will send me the nicest e-mail I have ever received from anyone, and reading it will make me want to hide in a cave for 10,000 years. It will make me feel like I am reading Lenore’s obituary in the news paper. I will send her an e-mail in return, and I will pray that she finds endless happiness in life, and I will always secretly hope that she never likes another man as much as she likes me, even if she ultimately loves that man more. And we will never see each other again.”
“But then we took a walk and started talking about our relationship, and it immediately became awful. We eventually went back to her apartment and embarked on one of those terrible discussions where it feels like you’ll never speak again, so you just keep recycling the same gut-wrenching conversation over and over and over, because even a redundant discussion is better than losing someone forever.”
“Maybe it’s something they need to believe, because if they don’t, they will be struck with the mildly depressing revelation that dead people are simply dead. Everything else is human construction; everything else has nothing to do with the individual that died and everything to do with the people who are left behind (and who maybe wish those roles were somehow reversed).”
“I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything… I wish, just once, I could say, ‘This. This is good enough.”
— Chuck Palahniuk (via byrdseed)
me: wednesday works best for my schedule.
you: how about monday?
me: UMMMM?????????
