Jun
30
My Evening Vintage Image
1950’s gas-mask fashion
Forget your personal tragedy.
We're all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But once you get the damn hurt, use it; don't cheat with it.
“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera) (via she-alone)
Jun
27
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
James Nicoll (via srsly)
To A Passerby (translation)
The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;
Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue’s.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.
A lightning flash… then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?
Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
If you forget me by Pablo Neruda
If you forget me
If you forget me
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
(Pablo Neruda)
“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
Confucius (via kari-shma) (via quote-book)
pete tarslaw's 16 rules of novel writing
from how i became a famous novelist, by steve hely (2009).
- rule 1: abandon truth.
- rule 2: write a popular book. do not waste energy making it a good book.
- rule 3: include nothing from [one’s] own life.
- rule 4: must include a murder.
- rule 5: must include a club, secrets / mysterious missions, shy characters, characters whose lives are changed suddenly, surprising love affairs, women who’ve given up on love but turn out to be beautiful.
- rule 6: evoke confusing sadness at the end.
- rule 7: prose should be lyrical.
- rule 8: novel must have scenes on highways, making driving seem poetic and magical.
- rule 9: at dull points include descriptions of delicious meals.
- rule 10: main character is miraculously liberated from a lousy job.
- rule 11: include scenes in as many reader-filled towns as possible.
- rule 12: give readers versions of themselves, infused with extra awesomeness.
- rule 13: target key demographics.
- rule 14: involve music.
- rule 15: must have obscure, exotic locations.
- rule 16: include plant names.
Words That Don't Exist in the English Language
jmme:
figuremeout:lilabakar:upsider:
Gheegle: (Filipino) The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.
Culacino: (Italian) The mark left on a table by a cold glass.
Sgriob: (Gaelic) The itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky
L’esprit de escalier: (French) The feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when you think of all the things you should have said. Translated it means “the spirit of the staircase.”
Pari-pari and Saku-saku: (Japanese) Hard-crispy verses Soft-crispy, i.e. a rice cracker versus fried chicken
Stam: (Hebrew) An agreement out of amusement and frustration that something doesn’t have a satisfactory answer among those talking.
Forelsket: (Norweigen) The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.
Manja: (Malay) A characteristic or action for affectionate and pampered/being pampered.
Dupey (pronouced Duh-Up-Pee; Jamaican Patwa) A bothersome ghost or apperition.
“
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.
” Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) (via she-alone)
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