Being single visits a kind of constant, low-intensity misery on a person—at least on a person who doesn’t want to be single. Coming home to an empty house, not having anyone to confide in, facing illnesses on your own—being alone hurts, but people can get used to it. But being in a long-term relationship doesn’t spare you from all that day-to-day pain. It just banks it. Every day I’m with Terry, every day I’m not alone, a little misery gets put into a savings account, where interest is compounded hourly. The day Terry dies, all the pain I avoided when I was with him will be paid out all at once; I will suffer a windfall of misery. I imagine the pain would feel literally like being torn in two. Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about ‘one flesh’?
The Commitment | Dan Savage
1) When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else. 2) When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would. 3) Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page. 4) Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt. 5) Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it. 6) Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is. 7) Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet. 8) Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. 9) Don’t confuse honours with achievement. 10) Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
Zadie Smith’s 10 rules for writing, courtesy of The Guardian
I’ve been breaking 5 and 7 all week long.

(via flyfishfly)

What she wants to say has to do with all the people who’ve died; it has to do with her own feelings of enormous good fortune and imminent, devastating loss. If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not, exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half. She can bear the thought of her own death but cannot bear the thought of Clarissa’s. This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.
The Hours | Michael Cunningham
If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise? Truth will never start out popular in a world more concerned with marketability than righteousness. It will initially suffer ridicule and even violence - yet ultimately it is undeniable. All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.
Lauryn Hill

(via mur)

Pocket calculators encourage children to think that they have all the answers. If this belief were actually to take hold they might well seize power, which would undoubtably result in all of the furniture being much too small.
Metropolitan Life | Fran Lebowitz
All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive—you are leaking.
Metropolitan Life | Fran Lebowitz
I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don’t always like you.’ But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, ‘I’m not oblivious to you—that is, you can still hurt my feelings—but I can’t stand having you around.’ Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more moved if my mother had taken me in her arms and said ‘I like you.’ I wonder if just enjoying your kid’s company isn’t more important.
We Need To Talk About Kevin | Lionel Shriver
For many couples who quarrel, just what they are on opposite sides of may be unformed, a line of some sort, an abstraction that divides them—a history or floating grudge, an insensible power struggle with a life of its own: gossamer. Perhaps in times of reconciliation for such couples the unreality of that line assists its dissolve. ‘Look,’ I can see them noting, ‘there is nothing in the room; we can reach across the sheer air between us.’ But in our case, what separated us was all too tangible, and if it wasn’t in the room it could walk in of it’s own accord. Our son.
We Need To Talk About Kevin | Lionel Shriver
There was a message there, if he could teach himself the language. On rainy-day visits the surfaces of the buildings were pitiless and blank, as they were this day, years later, with the sidewalks hidden from view, the boy conjured an uninhibited city, where no one lived behind all those miles and miles of glass, no one caught up with loved ones in living rooms filled with tasteful and affirming catalog furniture, and all the elevators hung like broken puppets at the end of long cables. The city as a ghost ship in the last ocean at the rim of the world. It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles in overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.
Zone One | Colson Whitehead
And then there was the moment where I longed to say, I love you, but I held back. People say things at those moments and aren’t judged by them, everyone knows that—things like, You must never leave—but I felt this night could bear no more ambiguity. I would have to wait, for the luxury of saying that truth, till a moment when I was quite cool and he was quite sure of it anyway. That was the price.
Disturbances In The Field | Lynne Sharon Schwartz