#in

the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy. ↗

— Harold Brodkey

#innocence #love

Bye-bye, I thought, almost sure that I'd never see her again. But if I did - if we ran into each other someday - I knew we would smile and say polite things like How are you? and Give my regards to your parents, and we would secretly remember that we used to mean something to each other. And even if that never happened, if we never spoke again, I was grateful we'd have tonight. ↗

— Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

#love

We love the morning, because we know that there will be night soon! We love the night, because we know that there will be morning soon! Who loves the morning if there shall be no night? Who loves the night if there shall be no morning? ↗

— Mehmet Murat ildan

#love

It's not just that people sacrifice their love relationships, and the care of their children, to pursue their careers. Something like this has perhaps always existed. The point is that today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn't do it. ↗

— Charles Taylor

#love

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing. ↗

— Sydney Smith

#enjoyment #novels #pleasure #writing #love

And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless. ↗

— Emily Maguire

#love-of-books #love-of-reading #nsfw #reading #love

She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need. ↗

— Michelle Latiolais

#coping #drinking-your-troubles-away #happy-hour #loss #lost-love

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#grief #loss #love #pain #spirituality

Whoever thought up the phrase ‘Absence makes the heart grow founder’ was an idiot. Absence makes a bitch go crazy. -Elli, While Shea is Away ↗

— Toni Aleo

#sweet #true-love #love

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#passion #sensuality #words #love