“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
—Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works
May 2012
“
There’s no heartbreak quite like when you’re seventeen and you’ve realized someone could love you and then not love you. Just like that. No more love for you.
Wonder if it will ever hurt this bad again. Realize that it does but in more subtle ways. Heartbreak becomes a more controlled insanity in your twenties, a manageable illness.
Sometimes you almost miss the way it felt to get your heart broken for the first time by a boy. But not really. Not really at all.
” —Ryan O’Connell, How To Get Your Heart Broken By A Boy For The First Time
“It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in love; but she no longer believed in it for herself.”
—Daphne Kalotay, Russian Winter
“Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up. We love you so.”
—Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
April 2012
“Is love a tender thing? It is too rough,
Too rude, too boist’rous; and it pricks like thorn.” —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Too rude, too boist’rous; and it pricks like thorn.” —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
“He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be chanelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But, in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely—from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on, so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.”
—Paul Murray
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
—Roland Barthes
“But hurry, let’s entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.”
—Federico García Lorca
“A library is infinity under a roof.”
—Gail Carson Levine
“Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
—Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
“When you meet someone so different from yourself, in a good way, you don’t even have to kiss to have fireworks go off. It’s like fireworks in your heart all the time. I always wondered, do opposites really attract? Now I know for sure they do. I’d grown up going to the library as often as most people go to the grocery store. Jackson didn’t need to read about exciting people or places. He went out and found them, or created excitement himself if there wasn’t any to be found. The things I like are pretty simple. Burning CDs around themes, like Songs to Get You Groove On and Tunes to Fix a Broken Heart; watching movies; baking cookies; and swimming. It’s like I was a salad with a light vinaigrette, and Jackson was a platter of seafood Cajun pasta. Alone, we were good. Together, we were fantastic.”
—Lisa Schroeder, I Heart You, You Haunt Me
The Six Styles of Love
Eros
A passionate, physical, and emotional love based on aesthetic enjoyment; stereotype of romantic love.
Ludus
A love that is played as a game or sport; conquest; may have multiple partners at once.
Storge
An affectionate love that slowly develops from friendship, based on similarity.
Pragma
A love that is driven by the head, not the heart.
Mania
An obsessive love; experience great emotional highs and lows; very possessive and often jealous lovers
Agape
A selfless altruistic love; spiritual.
Love styles are modus operandi of how people love. This concept was originally developed by John Lee in 1977. He identified six basic love styles, or colors of love, that people use in their interpersonal relationships. Clyde Hendrick and Susan Hendrick of Texas Tech University expanded on this theory in the mid-1980s. They found that men tend to be more ludic, whereas women tend to be storgic or pragmatic. They noticed that mania is often the first love style that teenagers display. Relationships based on similar love styles were found to last longer.
“No one rises above who he or she has been without first having fallen down. The best time - in fact, the only time - to make a real change in your life is in the moment of seeing the need for it. He who hesitates always gets lost in the hundred reasons why tomorrow is a better day to get started.”
—Guy Finley
“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don’t think it’s possible for you to miss me as much as I’m missing you right now.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
“
Forget how his eyes looked when he was trying so valiantly to tell you how sorry he was. Forget how deep it seemed that cold rainy night and how the pain reflected in his eyes was enough to make you stumble forward and hug him like it was the first time. You gave your all to that hug, wrapped your arms around his body and buried your head into his arms. Forget how you wanted to stay there forever and just skip the talking. Forget how you pulled away and looked into his eyes so you can tell him that you still don’t believe him.
Forget how the sides of his mouth turn up and how his hands reach out to touch any part of you every time you see each other. Forget the feeling of ‘being found,’ do not even feel that way again for anyone.
Forget that one boring afternoon when you suddenly convinced him to shoot music videos. He was the star of everything. He was too good in your eyes that you even included the crappy shots. Do not even watch it for one last time. Delete all the memories to forget. Delete the music. Delete the place. Delete the person from your hard drive. Fill them with someone else right then and there. Remark at how easy it was.
Forget his gift for your 18th birthday. Forget his efforts for you. Dispose of all his gifts, those things that he bought for you because you both know it would be funny. Laugh because you can’t find it anywhere. Not in your room, not around the house, not in your bag. Hate his letters but don’t throw them away yet. Convince yourself to not believe in those kinds of lies and read them anytime someone tells you those things again. Do not ever forget these lies.
Forget the time he cried one night because he was telling you something about his mother. Forget his secrets, his quirks, the things that he claims he had only said to you. Share them with someone unrelated to him. Someone who doesn’t really know him. Transfer the burden of the only person knowing those things right at the moment. Assure yourself he’s going to tell them to someone else sooner or later. Cherish the idea of having a social side wherein no one knows he exists. Find time to be with them as much as possible.
Forget who he is. Remember to forget. Remember how he walks, the color of his skin, the curve of his neck, the shape of his lips, and find it in the strangers you meet day after day. Find him in other people and think how truly ordinary he is because you see him so much in other people. People you don’t even know. People you know. Fight the nostalgia. Be in understated comfort knowing he wasn’t really special to begin with.
And lastly, forget yourself. Forget who you are when you are with him. Forget the unwilling relationship he had imposed on you, leave all the traces of his negativity behind you. Forget how happy he made you feel, likewise remember how stupid you felt when you believed him. Forget being forgiving, how he was the only person to have broken your trust more than enough times and yet, stick to him undeservingly so. Forget being noble, for sticking to a person who doesn’t deserve you. For thinking that maybe you both could do good in each other’s lives. Forget being idealistic, how he managed to corrupt your mind that something can overcome all trivialities: something called love (platonic or otherwise). Forget being mad and mean, a consequence of being in a place wrought out of lies.
Forget who you are when you are with him and find yourself in a place rid of any trace of him. Forget everything and start in a better place.
” —Nicole Mariano, Important Things To Forget
“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”
—Anaïs Nin, Henry & June
“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
