Wednesday, November 19, 2008

You were meant to read these words.

"I would never admit it aloud, even to him, but I like me the way I am. Driven. Busting my ass to do everything just the right way makes me feel good about myself. Bulletproof."
--Niki Burnham, 'Sticky Fingers'

“It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no on else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.”
--Dorothy Allison, 'Two or Three Things I Know for Sure'

I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it. They may think they get it, but they don’t. This is the sign you’ve been looking for. You were meant to read these words.

She liked to pretend she was a prism, like things could pass through her and be beautiful.

"Take up a cup of water from the ocean and there I am."
--Jack Kerouac

Not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. Begin anywhere.

The person who cuts you off in traffic is 9 times out of 10, your father driving your mother to the hospital so she can give birth to you.

If you really want to know something about me, you should know this: I like my music loud. I mean loud. I'm not talking the kind of loud where your parents knock on your bedroom door and ask you to turn it down. Please. That's amateur house. When I say loud, I mean you can't hear your parents knocking and the neighbors are putting a for sale sign on their house and moving to another block because they can't handle the constant noise anymore loud. You have to turn it up so that your chest shakes and the drums get in between your ribs like a heartbeat and the bass goes up your spine and frizzles your brain and all you can do is dance or spin in a circle or just scream along because you know that however this music makes you feel, it's exactly right.

"It's just those details -- poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul- that make a woman lively and real. The women on posters or in fashion magazines, the ones all woman nowadays try to imitate, lack charm because they're unreal, because they're merely the sum total of abstract instructions. They're not born of human bodies, but of computers."
--Milan Kundera, 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'

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