Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come.
Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald
I think things ought to belong to the people that like them” – and then sweeping into it all the yellow articles she could find, a pencil, a lipstick, a little note book, “because they all go together.
Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald.
(apropos)
“Her face in repose falls to a frown and sitting alone in a cafe she is rarely approached. Only the most brazen strangers talk to her and they’re the least appealing. They frighten and offend her, these men who believe a pretty woman has the obligation to smile, that she owes the world her beauty.”
I’m serious, she concluded, speaking from the heart: Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.
marquez, memories of my melancholy whores
the beautiful and damned, fitzgerald
She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the third or fourth night I began to lose interest and didn’t go back.
Bukowski, Post Office
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
Ultimately, it won’t last.
“Maybe you’re right, I say. Ultimately, it won’t last. Relationships end, affairs fall apart. But it doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t have them. It doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t fall crazily in love and live.
Passionate love affairs die hard. They convulse and writhe and agonize till the bitter end. But the bliss and the headiness of love is worth the agony of the breakup. Death always comes at the end of life.
What you did, I might have done it too. The details, the sequences, might have been different. I might have been less cruel, more decisive, but sooner or later it would have ended.”
This is a passage from the most moving, portentous, and beautiful book I have ever read. God, there are so many amazing passages, I want to transcribe the entire thing here. It’s called Breakup: The End of a Love Story and it is about… the end of a love story.
I am admittedly bias because I find stories about breakups, breakdowns and the breakdown of breakups inherently fascinating because of their voyeuristic nature, but this book is arresting and it will rip you apart.
It’s Texier’s memoir and is specifically about a marriage disintegrating slowly because of an affair, but anyone who has been in and fallen out of love with someone will relate to the unbearable, stinging pain that comes with being able to see and feel your relationship falling apart, but being completely helpless.
Her profoundly candid descriptions of watching her husband - someone who was so hers - become someone else’s are devastating, and the intricacies of her alternating relatable, crippling weakness and admirable, redeeming strength make her a compelling and multifaceted character and not a simply a bystander in her husband’s indiscretions.
(And, bonus: parts are a lil literary porny…)
We didn’t do anything about the cat
I have an unspeakable obsession with words describing women crying.
THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE
Just read this collection of stories called The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret.
They’re weirdly violent (not my fave. well… violent sexual intimacy), creepy, unsettling,and at times (simultaneously) heartbreaking and heartbreakingly romantic, but they all display a deep allegiance to portraying honest human emotion, regardless of how fantastical or dark the subject.
AND I LOVE AN HONEST HUMAN EMOTION!!!
Really into this excerpt of a love letter from Flaubert to Louise Colet. Mainly cuz I like sexual self aggrandizement, violent sexual intimacy and machismo… but also because it makes my moist youthful bones quiver.
You can go to sleep, if you want,” he said, perhaps the kindest words he’d ever spoken to me […]
Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called civilization and its discontents.
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
