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“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things 

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what’s your definition of intimacy?

understanding. wanting to understand eachother.

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ok i know we all go cuckoo crazy bananas for tender yearning pining whatever but i was just actually thinking about the roots of the word tender and how a —tender is someone who tends and that “tender” is not just concern and sympathy but also caring for and looking after and nourishing and tending which is a very gentle and beautiful thing and it’s all very “don’t you think they are maybe the same thing? love and attention?” and “i love you. i want us both to eat well.”

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“I know someone who kisses the way / a flower opens,”

— Mary Oliver, from I Know Someone

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read all 30

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Moon (Oct. 30, 2019)

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“Something in me wants more. I can’t rest.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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on your horizon

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what if things go well? that’s a possibility.

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Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

#quote

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                 It’s going to rain soon, close clouds bloated above us, the air like a net about to release all the caught fishes, a storm siren in the distance. I know you don’t always understand, but let me point to the first wet drops landing on the stones, the noise like fingers drumming the skin. I can’t help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.

—Ada Limón, from “The Last Thing,” The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018)

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Anne Hathaway for Sunday Times Style

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Högbonden, 2015 Magnus Åström

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Sometimes you read a line from a book and it’s like something from your own head or something from your journal. And that part of you is a bit more defined, a bit sharper, and a bit easier to understand and explain to others.

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i've recently taken up illustrating and that's something i never thought i'd do. i've always admired artists and painters and illustrators but i always thought my strengths were more in writing. i backed away from drawing or painting, entirely convinced that i couldn't do it but in reality, i never actually gave it a try. i've experimented with so many different art forms (poetry & photography & graphic design) and yet i never went near a pencil. i think i was stuck and needing another way to express an idea. i was needing so desperately to get closer to my art and that's the only way i can describe it. i needed to get closer to the root of it all. to physically bring the idea out of the ground and have full control over it. and i think in illustration, i've found the space to do that. it's different than writing which i use to work through ideas and emotions. it's different than photography which i use to capture moments and spaces and time. i think i’m realizing there are a lot of days when i just want to talk in images or colors or patterns. it's all storytelling, just using different tools.

#things #dear diary #on art

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it can be tempting to live your life like a prequel. to live as if you’re setting up your own story.and once you lose the weight, once you have the money, once you graduate school, once you’re in a real relationship, once, once, once. then finally, you’ll begin to live, and everything you do up until that point is some kind of half-life, some unimportant foreword you can skip. don’t do this. inhabit your life completely. sink fully into the wealth of your existence. the power to manifest is in the fearless owning of who you are, so that you can shape where you’re going.