Funny, when I was in first grade and came home to tell my parents that I was the top student in my class in our recent exams, my very delighted father said, “You definitely got your brains from your mother; I wasn’t a good student at all!” So what I’m saying is, fuck you, Gymboree and JC Penney. (at Dukes Coffee Roasters)
15 hours ago
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Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.
By making time to read, like making time to love, we expand our time for living.
If we had to think of love in terms of our busy schedule, who’d risk it? Who’s got time to fall in love? But have you ever seen someone in love not finding time for it?
I’ve never had time to read, but nothing’s ever stopped me from finishing a novel I loved.
Reading isn’t about managing your social life better; it’s a way of being, like being in love.
The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac (translated by Sarah Adams). But though Pennac is angry, and gets off a pretty good metaphor comparing modern books to hormone-fed chickens, in the end it’s all in service of an embarrassingly pure admiration for what books are, and what they can be. A must-read if you’re in the business of books, I think. (3/3)
(Source: bookavore)
3 days ago
54 notes
Love says: I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.
