"My first high-school Rayanne, from whom I learned to inhale, wasn’t a virgin, and when she was drunk, her Southern accent got stronger. When she was bleaching my hair in her bathtub, we laughed so hard and so loud that her younger sister told us we needed hysterectomies. I had never been happier, more fully in love with the very moment that I was living, even with a head that smelled like ammonia."

Emma Straub, in this gorgeous Paris Review article about My So-Called Life but really about female friendships 

"The difference between reality and imagination wasn’t ever clear to me at all."

David Lynch, on making Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

View high resolution

(via)

“Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

— Adrienne Rich, “Power”

"I closed the book and changed my life and changed my life and changed my life and one more change and I was back here looking up at a blue sky with russets and the World was hypnotic but it wasn’t great. I wanted more range, maybe, more bliss, I didn’t know about bliss. Is bliss just a rant about the size of the bowl? The trance was the true thing, no, the rant, no, the sky, now, that icy whiteness."

Bruce Smith, “Untitled [I closed the book and changed my life]”

"Here among bones and bleached arroyos the sun leans
through my window at dawn to let me know
I’m not going anywhere. There’s no more anywhere to go."

Kurt Brown, “Road Trip”

"or as the seeing are the blind
and robins never welcome spring
nor flatfolk prove their world is round
nor dingsters die at break of dong
and common’s rare and millstones float
—long enough and just so long
tomorrow will not be too late"

e.e. cummings, [as freedom is a breakfastfood]

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
“Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk.” No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unlovliness.

— James Merrill, “Charles on Fire”

"It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read."

Lemony Snicket  (via valiuum)

(Source: runa-lovegood, via books-and-bibelots)

"My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that ‘Can I Kick It?’ should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy."

Zadie Smith, writing about joy in this excellent NY Review of Books essay