A commonplace book
“people want to hear songs with words they’re afraid to say”
“I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”
— Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952
“Everything I’ve ever let go of—has claw marks on it.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“Mankind invented the atomic bomb, but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap.”
— Albert Einstein
“Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”
— Naguib Mahfouz
“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
“I weep because you cannot save people. You can only love them.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
“But if you’re going to leave anyway, I will try to see you off with love. I will try to say thank you. For knowing me. For stopping by.”
— Alida Moon
“What cannot be said will be wept.”
— Sappho, If Not Winter
“Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”
— Ovid
“Nostalgia is proof that you are living a life worth living. It is a privilege to yearn for your own memories.”
“Sometimes I think I have felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.”
— Theodore Twombly, Her
“How can I describe my life to you? I think a lot, listen to music. I’m fond of flowers.”
— Susan Sontag, Death Kit
“I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on the couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.”
“I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.”
— Sylvia Plath
“I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.”
— Roger Zelazny
“I exist in two places, here and where you are.”
— Margaret Atwood
“When you understand that every opinion is a vision loaded with personal history, you will begin to understand that all judgment is confession.”
— Nikola Tesla
“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ‘’idea of them”.”
— Anaïs Nin
“You are free, and that is why you are lost.”
— Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father
“I think you carry the people you’ve loved with you forever, not in a ‘you can never get over them’ way but more like loving them changed you and it meant something and you have to make peace with that.”
“I have a new plan: to go mad.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to his brother 9th August 1838
“If you want to learn what someone fears losing, watch what they photograph.”
“So many songs to listen to. So many books to read. So many things to watch. So much stuff to write. I think I will sit here and decompose.”
“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.”
— Heidi Priebe
“People do not see you, they invent you and accuse you.”
— Hélène Cixous, The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; The Perjured City
“I desire violently—and I wait.”
— Anaïs Nin, The Voice
“Most people are just sinners judging other sinners for sinning differently.”
— Sui Ishida
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Why is loss cumulative? A friend and I part ways and suddenly I am grieving everyone I have lost since age 15.”
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
— Carl Jung
“Grief is not a feeling, but a neighborhood. This is where I come from. Everyone I love still lives here.”
— Brenna Twohy, Swallowtail
“The present moment is lost to me as I am distracted by an ongoing analysis of my own actions and the reactions of those around me.”
“It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.”
— Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire
“The shortest poem is a name.”
— Anne Michaels, Infinite Gradation
“I think ultimately you become whoever would have saved you that time no one did.”
“I am afraid that if I open myself I will not stop pouring. Why do I fear becoming a river? What mountain gave me such shame?”
— Jamie Oliveria
“Crawl inside this body, find me where I am most ruined - love me there.”