yay! I feel accomplished. two posts in one week. that translates to two books. i am keeping good on my promise of more reading. :)

i hope you enjoy it.

these quotes are from "Reading, Writing and Leaving Home" by Lynn Reed.
anyone insterested?
let me know, i can mail it to you.
:)

"Only long after I was old enough to read for myself did I really make the connection between literature and the printed word."

"What Blyton understood very well, even in her Noddy books for the very young, was the universal desire of children to escape from the sovereignty of adults. And so, the fact that Noddy had his own car, which, like him, was an animated toy, and that he made off in it with Big Ears, his friend, or later, in Blyton's pre-adolescent novels there were rebels and runaways and naughty children finding adventure beyond the pale - this freedom was a wonderful thing for a girl living at the bottom of Africa and dreaming of leaving herself, somehow, for the real world."

"I found myself reading a book or seeing an opera or play in a kind of stereoscope: what was written, and then would could have happened, what should have happened."

"From the start, i was treated with amusement, like a sort of wild card. How did such a thing happen to us? But there I was - undemanding, as disappointments tend to be at first, and not unpleasant."

"Most of what we think we remember of early childhood, we have made up or extrapolated from what others have told us. What I remember beyond what I have been told is a tremendous need to please, a talent for getting a laugh by playing the fool, and, most of all, an early passion for a future of my own. How this latter would be accomplished, what, in fact, it would be, I had no idea. But there it was as I ran wild and naked around the garden, or built a tree house high in the mango tree, sat up their singing hymns and arias at the top of mt voice. What I knew was that I wanted something magnificent for myself, something far away, in the real world, something quite different from what lay ahead for my sisters or for other girls I knew."

"Feeling idiotic, poised between the terror of being approached by a boy and the excrutiation of being overlooked, I would stand there, consumed with rage."

^I never understood the appeal of shark week...why is it necessary? i probably offended like, half of my school by saying that.

"As a woman, I was failing, that I knew. The standard female shriek-and-giggle mating dance was impossible for me. Apart from anything else, I talked too much."

"It is one thing to eliminate possibilites, however, quite another to find one's own way."

^OMG. little ron.

"I went back to my cabin that night and I sorted through my clothes, saving only a pair of shorts, one skirt and a blouse. The rest I carried onto the deck and threw, piece by piece, overboard. That was the beginning."

"I stopped teasing my hair, grew it long and straight, painted my eyelids black, wore white lipstick and smoke a cigar. Slowly, I collected a wardrobe of miniskirted shifts, shirts and ties, platform shoes, my first bikini. I chose them in blacks and browns and whites, corduroy, denim, cotton. Catching sight of myself in a glass window now was like falling in love, better than falling in love."

"I had been haunted by the awful curse of sentimentality and nostalgia. It had clouded the truth with threadbare images, useless abstractions."

"The proper object of revenge must be worthy. And, to be worthy, it must either be trouble or love."

"I simply had to count on being understood by the ones I loved. Or, if misunderstood, on being forgiven. Or, if not forgive, on not giving a damn."

"To a child, nothing that is familiar in her world - not earthquakes or revolutions, slavery or sodomy, poverty or riches - seems exotic or wicked."

^BAHAHAHAHA yes.

"I'm not sure that, given half a chance, all the children the world over are not violent and sadistic - that the oppressive overlay of 'niceness' in child-rearing America ('Be nice! Be nice!') isn't itself a player in a society seething with weapons and hatred."

"What she must do, if the fiction is to take breath, is to defictionalise the life, to disentangle it from the myths and fictions that we all create in order to control what we cannot alter."

"The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no once."

"In a battle of competing truths, fiction, if it is done right, will always win over what fondly passes for fact."

"Life is a mess; fiction is orderly."

"We had, after all, grown up with the conundrum of living life as art."

"The sources of fiction are myriad and complex - a character, a character in a situation, a phrase, a scene, a setting, a smell - anything at all by an idea attached to an intention."

"I often find a virgin visit, a purposeless visit, leaves one open to the magic of a place, if magic is to be found there at all."

"That leap of heart and spirit, the wonderful sense of the world without myself in it."

"How, after all, does one own such a place? How does one own any place? By buying it? By building on it? By happening to have grown up in it? No. And not by loving it, either. For the purposes of imagination, one can only own such a place the way one owns one's own history; by experiencing it, by forgetting it, by recreating it."

"'Who cares?' I kept asking myself - a deadly question. The answer was - the answer always is when one has to ask it - No one."

"Writers seem to suffer more than most in wanting to be loved, or, perhaps, in wanting to be admired (which, I suppose, amounts to the same thing). At least they want this until they discover the only way to be truly loved/admired is to find their own way and forget the audience. Longing for an audience and therefore guaranteeing none is, perhaps, the greatest curse."

"I dressed, I attended classes, I made new friends. But nothing I did seem connected to anything that had gone before or to what might follow. In the urban cacophony in which I lived, my spirit seemed sunk in silence - deep and sad, wide and terrifying."

"If nobody knows me, who am I? If nothing is familiar, where am I? And, if I don't want to be here, why am I?"

"I do not belong here, and I have learned to turn not belonging into a triumph."

^haha, I always just go and get the poster and say "I CALL HOLDING POSTER." how can you be expected to read something you are hiding behind? i know, genius plan.

"Stay away long enough, and you belong nowhere anymore."

"I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free."

"I have always been a natural foreigner; there, here, anywhere. From an early age, my fantasies centered themselves around a restless vision - a vision of life lived between two worlds - someone just arrived, just about to leave, always with somewhere to go home to."

"What I wanted - what I had wanted ever since I could remember - was the vague delight of being a stranger in a strange place."

"Home, he said, was where he was."

"Over the years, I began to feel more or less strange everywhere. I also felt more or less at home. Homesick for nowhere. Permanently displaced. Free to come and go at last."

"I suffered what I can only describe as a loss of self, a loss which seemed to preclude all hope for the future, all freedom, all joy."

"I was asking myself the question i had been asking myself for as long as I could remember: Is this what you want? Is this what you really want?"

"Who, after all, has not experienced subtle and profound shifts? Who has not grown up? At least to the age of nineteen and twenty? Who, in a nation of immigrants, cannot go back a generation or two and find something that might pass for exotic? Ethnically engaging? Heartrendingly pitiful? Or even sublimely ordinary?" 

"The beautiful things we shall write if we have the talent are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of a melody that delights us though we are unable to recapture it's outline. Those who are obsessed by this blurred memory of truth they have never known are the men who are gifted...Talent is like a sort of memory which will enable them to finally bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down." - Proust

"I have become a cartoon of myself for an audience of strangers."

"Hell, in fact, is never very far away."

"But how much more future can one want for oneself? And how long can one go on wanting it?"

"Ask yourself what obsesses you and write about that."

"In a culture rendered terrifyingly glib by the rhetoric of lying, one must grasp on to the truth with both hands - embracing what cannot be solved, asking questions to which there can be no answers."

"...a woman barely five feet tall and just over a hundred pounds, eternally troubled, wildly ambitious, and essentially bourgeois - a long-nosed sparrow who took herself more seriously than God."

"After the funeral, one of my old loves phoned me, the one I had loved longer than any other. He phoned to say he'd jusst heard, and how sorry he was. But I didn't recognize his voice anymore; he had to repeat his name three times."

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:)

Hello everyone :)

I apologize for the later than usual update. But it's here. Better late than never, I suppose.

Today's quotes are from "High School Confidential" by Jeremy Iverson. It wasn't my favorite, but it was interesting. Enjoy.

To my new subscribers since last update - thank you. Really. I appreciate it so much.

And to my old subscribers, thank you even more for sticking with me.

"All your life every young man has wanted to be a cowboy. Why play Wall Street and die young when you can play cowboy and never die?" - Will Rogers

 "Standing in a daze, I met a girl I knew, and I told her I didn't get it. Together we folded my Phi Beta Kappa-Merill Lynch-foreign policy developer-neurobiology researcher resumes into little paper boats and sailed them across the great fountain. Recruiters and classmates glanced over in suits, confused. Then I thought, 'Fuck it,' and we jumped into the water ourselves, just dove in, and soon we laughed and splashed each other in a sea of little resume boats under a glistening shower of falling droplets."

"I smiled big as I grabbed my diploma and damped sown the distant terror of the unknown. I found the laughter awesome and steeling, because I had never been that guy before. Although I was headed to God knew where, I was off the Track, I was doing something new for once in my life." 

"Want to be more than info-superhighway traffic, want to be more than a walking demographic." - MC Lars

"I quickly realized that sometimes over the previous twenty-five years, America had become a land where everyone knew they were victims. Victims who would klutz coffee into their laps and then flail off to sue the human genome for reckless endangerment."

"Satre said that hell is other people. He never spent lunch alone at high school."

 "It's a fake town. They sweep all the problems away under the carpet and they pretend everything is perfect."

"You can try to win by charm, cleverness, courage or sex appeal, but when the situation goes critical, all Trackstars know you just put your head down and attempt to outwork the universe."

"Time, as it tends to, passed."

^i wish i slept there every night with my love.

"Anybody that thinks about it realizes it doesn't matter what party's in power. It's going to be the same. You pay taxes, you have your little house. Some people think everything they hear in the media is true. It's not."

"Alexis sank downward as the induction pulled her into a peaceful dark cocoon away from the world of light. The room's laughter hovered distantly and unimportantly at the edge of reality as she entered the dreamy ordeal of a hypnosis stage show, freezing and scalding and dancing on command."

"And that was as far as he could hold it before the emptiness overtook him."

"The Monday morning sun that stabbed through the cracks in the blinds struck a Derrick that almost no one in school saw, no matter how hard they tried. On the rare occasion they did catch a glimpse of it, they edited it out. They thought that he was just acting aloof, that he had rejected them, that they didn't exist at his level, that the fault lay with them. Definitely not with him. In high school, you doubt yourself first."

"All illumination looked strangely muted, as if the constant light had filtered through smoky glass." 

^yes, I always think about cuddling when it rains/is cloudy/is cold. i think it must be an instinct.

"No matter what any of them did, drove sober or drove drunk, death would claim them sooner or later."

"Derrick shook his head slowly. 'See,' he said, 'girls don't want to look ugly. But poison doesn't work a lot of the time, and then you go to the hospital and get your stomach pumped, you're still alive, and then you have to go to counseling, and that would just my life even worse.'"

"He went to the room and locked the door. Bright sunshine leaked around the blinds, and the air felt heavy and still. He lay on his bed, the tangled sheets pressed against his skin."

"It's sad because no one ever leaves. They all think there's no world outside of Emerald Valley."

"Cody talked calmly with Jasmine amid the chaotic spiral of screaming violence."

"It's the pain that makes us pure."

"'Last summer me and Dove spent two weeks playing 007 with his cousin and his sister. Dove and me were the best and won like, every time. And that's basically all we did for two solid weeks, we just played 007. And we ate Starbuck's ice cream, bowls and bowls of Starbuck's ice cream.' He smiled. 'Those were the greatest weeks. Ever.'"

"Whatever I do in my life, I'm always loosing everything."

"Their skin contacted, and Thea couldn't really understand what separated their two existences, besides everything, of course."

"However, grown-up games are known as 'business,' and even though the games of youth are much the same, they are punished for them by their elders." - St. Augustine of Hippo

"Derrick spent the weekend in his room trying to stay functional. The television repeated stories about wildfire conditions."

"Always good and bad come conjoined, but rarely in equal measure."

"Anything could happen because most of it already had."

"My last shot, all I got, and it means everything. No more magnet town. Tonight I defy gravity." - Army of Freshmen

"And upon waking, Zhuangzi no longer knew if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Vertigo." 

"I bet if you enter enough viewpoints, the whole of creation makes sense. To understand all is to forgive all."

"While I still had the power to create reality, I decided to fix everything wrong in my life."

"Everything you are and do from fifteen to eighteen is what you are and will do through life." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"With a sudden fall from the sublime, the space between heaven and earth explodes back into infinity."

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final installment of quotes from the book "Please Don't Kill The Freshman: A Memoir" by Zoe Trope. wow, I know. a lot of quotes. but I love them all. the book was just so full of these little musings.

thank you so much for your support. :) and to my something like 14 subscribers, i love you guys. seriously. it makes me feel like updating is worth while. 

by the way, is anyone interested in my copy of this book? message me if so...i'd be happy to send it away for someone else to enjoy. really. anyone can have it. i'd rather have it being read than sitting on my shelf collecting dust. (:

"I am a girl from a movie in 1973. I have slightly oily skin and a crooked nose. My best friend is a gay boy who is equally awkward. We think we are beautiful. We are so beautiful, in fact, that we name each other after computer systems, architecture and countries. In my 1973 bedroom with my posters of 1973 movie stars and rock'n'roll celebrities, we lie on my bed with frilly pink sheets and talk about things. Mostly boys. We experiment with drugs and each other.We call each other beautiful and amazing and we say "I love you" with utter conviction. We kiss. I think he's got the softest tongue and I touch him...He's got a mouth like meat and I want to cut it open with a sharp knife. This movie was made in 1973, and I'm the star, but I've never seen the ending."

"'How do you feel?' I ask. 'Like someone is making me beautiful,' he replies.'"

"Truth never tasted so good."

"Today isn't happening yet."

"Things change. Boys become butterflies that rest gently on my shoulder. Girls become creatures who look tearfully out the windows and ask why."

"This is not the end of anything but the beginning of everything."

"I'm sorry if I wasn't interesting enough."

"When I said something, you laughed and I was rather surprised. I didn't even know what to do the first time I heard that sound. I tried to pause but that seemed snotty so I continued."

"I think you make me beautiful. Thank you."

"I love people too much and for this reason I will always be alone."

"Sometimes I'm not sure what I want from you or what you want from me. Sometimes I think we are just as lost as we ever were, and we're not finding anything new, we just keep circling the same landmarks because we know what they look like and they are easy to spot on the map."

"Sometimes I hate the way you answer questions with lines from movies or songs. I ate the way you are so wiling to use someone else's answer instead of your own. I hate the way you try so hard to be vague and obscure and you just make me frustrated. Sometimes I hate the way I get frustrated with you."

"I like you in your high-water polyester pants and shiny black tie. I like your too-long black hair which you attempt to make stand on ends. I like the words you write."

"Have fun with that girl at winter formal. I hope she makes you more beautiful than I was ever able to."

"I like rainy afternoons where my room is naturally dark and there are shadows everywhere, between my fingertips and our tongues and my parents never walk by the open door of my bedroom so I can unbutton his shirt and kiss his stomach, make him suck in his breath."

"Something bad is always coming."

"Sometimes the butterflies move from my stomach to my fingers. You make me tremble."

"I like the way she sings in my heart."

"When I woke up, she was there. Her hands and body and arms weren't but she was there."

"Birthday parties are simply the results of broken condoms."

"Now your phone number is written on my palm and I'm pretending you wrote it there. I'm pretending we met somewhere interesting, like a library or a book store or a coffee shop, and I don't don't know anything about you. I'm pretending I feel in love with you when I first saw you. It's so hard not to pretend."

"Boy is sweet like candy and sugar and spreads his cash on the counter for the things that I want. He is lovely and I am sorry and sad for every person who will ever take advantage of him, including me."

"I always feel safer when I have words against my heart."

"But really, we're all suffering from our own terminal disease. There's no date set on when but we are all going to die or lose the people we love one way or another."

"'Those who aren't busy being born are busy dying.' Wasn't it Bob Dylan who said that? Or something like it? And I agree. The only difference between me and the guy with AIDS is his virus has a name and ribbon. Mine's got me."

"Everyone hates themselves in one way or another. Some people can just readily admit it and lavish in it."

"Want to know my favorite dream about her? Showing up at my doorstep in the rain with tears streaming down her face. Isn't that morbid? I want her to need me to save her."

^fyi, i'm not religious, i just found that touching

"The spaces between his fingers are the only places I belong."

"I am the reason I don't want to have kids."

"What is your definition of war for kids? Dot-to-dot his missing limbs, match the food with the starving refugee, put together the puzzle pieces of a mother's broken heart? Want me to climb the plastic tank-shaped structure in my backyard and play 'war'? Want me to make a gun with my hand and kill my brother? Want me to sit with my nose against the screen while Big Bird adorns combat boots and a helmet and they sing the national anthem with karaoke-style light up words at the bottom? What is your definition for war for kids? What's your definition of war for me?"

"I tape my hopeless heart to everything."

"Maybe I don't love anyone less but my hands and heart are just lazier."

"I am a whore for attention and I spread my legs almost as wide as my mouth."

"I chew the fingernails I don't have and pray to the God I don't believe in."

"You scare the fuck out of me. Scare me because maybe you want me and I wonder if it's really me you want or what it is you really want because sometimes it's like I'm inside of you but not close enough inside that I can say all the things I want to say."

"She looks at me with her Cheshire-cat smile and my heart can't take it."

"No one sits on their front porch anymore. Everyone stays inside hitting their children and fucking their wives and watching CNN."

"But she is beautiful and I am wonderful and maybe the continued spontaneous use of these adjectives when applied appropriately to the right people can save the world."

"I am so tired of the hours bleeding on and the Saturdays turning into Sundays turning into Mondays."

"Your hand's so soft. Why's your hand so soft with all those hard words coming out of your mouth?"

"He is easily overwhelmed by his own mind and the possibilities he creates."

"I'm supposed to be taking notes on war and hate but I'd much rather love you. It's all about love and I don't care about infantry and firebombing because I am outside of it, away from it."

"War? What war? If I don't turn on a TV or pick up a newspaper, there is NO war. It doesn't exist to me. Isn't it scary how disconnected we can be from everything else?"

"Can you look yourself in the mirror every morning and admit that you are no different from every other bundle of bones on the planet?And maybe the only things that make you different are your hands, the way you touch things, and what happens to them."

"My life is lies and typos."

"I've been alive for fifteen years. Does that scare you? Does it scare you that I've been alive all fifteen of those years and maybe you've only been living for ten of yours?"

"Doe eyes, dark hair, pale skin."

"Everybody's heart is beating and everyone's bathroom is dirty and we all have a lot more in common than we'd like to think."

"It's just love. It's just a little four-letter word, it's just whispered between 'I' and 'you' before you make her come, it's just a heart-shaped symbol, it's just all you need, according to John Lennon."

"You're not crazy, you're just not sane and THAT makes you an artist."

"I miss him more than I've ever missed anyone I haven't met yet."

"I have been in love with him a million times. Forever is stupid promise that no one can really keep, but we already have. We've already done all this a million times, but we were wearing different costumes and calling each other different names. So forever isn't from now until then, it's from then until now. We've kept a backwards promise and it's still coming true."

"I feel possessed by him and vice versa."

"Everyone falls in love exactly the same way and there is NOTHING special about us and how we feel for each other. It's all been done and it's been done so much better so why do we even bother? Maybe I enjoy remixing the same words and feelings and making them my own. But in the end it's all just that - feelings and words and pretty metaphors."

"She doesn't have my heart, she has the heart in my brain, the sloppy valentine from second grade, the chocolate candy, the curve of my index fingers and thumbs to make a hand heart. And I can say it beats for her but that's a lie too. My fifth-grade teacher told us the heartbeat is involuntary, meaning you can't stop it. It just beats on and on and you don't have any control over it. You don't think about it, it just beats."

"Apathy is a disease and sometimes I long for it. I kiss people who have it with the hope of infection but I still care. And I care too much. And I don't want to care. Caring gives me headaches and makes me cry and makes me hate myself because don't you people understand that YOU ARE PEOPLE TOO and youth is not the ultimate excuse no matter how much you want it to be. No matter how much I want it to be."

^ I saw "The Social Network" (sick movie) and I feel like this is how Mark Zuckerberg would pay his bills. what a BAMF.

"Am I just your spy? Do you mock me because I'm funny? I bet I am hilarious and I bet you laugh because you are too scared to admit that I'm you. The stupid teenage girl. You know everything about me because you know my age and everything I do is FUNNY because I'm so little. I'm the emotional equivalent of a midget and you laugh at me. The correct term is EMOTIONALLY CHALLENGED. What is it about us? Teenagers? Do you just like saying the word? Do we look funny? Baby fat and breasts, cocks we don't have any use for, lipstick on our teeth. We're like pretend people to you and we make you uncomfortable. You laugh because we are you. You pity us because we are you. Just admit it, the girl writing this is no different from you. I've got a heart beating in my chest too and the only difference is I use it. Is it funny that my passion isn't dead but my peers are? Is it funny that my best friend was raped and the boy who did it still walks through the halls of this school? Is it funny to you that my high school has the highest pregnancy rate and is it funny to you that on my first day of school my teacher told me that one in four of my classmates wouldn't graduate? I'm glad we're so entertaining and funny to you. I'm glad you can laugh because I think you're too scared to cry."

"It's so scary to not be able to run away from yourself. In the dream you can run away from the monster but I can't runaway from myself. I can't get out of my own head."

"It doesn't really matter how amazing you are, only how amazing you seem."

"Because I do everything. Because I'm stubborn. Because I think I'm ugly. Because the girl I want to be is beautiful all the time and knows it. Because the girl I want to be has thin wrists and still admonishes society for ruining the image of women. Because I want to write with my left hand in my perfect notebook with my perfect pen. Because the girl I want to be never doubts anything she does and would never write something like this."

"It's about explaining the finality of death to immortal teenagers."

"I want to kiss everyone. I know that isn't healthy and I'm sorry. But It's true. Thin lips and braces and big teeth and lip gloss and I don't care. I want every person in the kingdom to try on the slipper and see if it fits. i want to find the perfect kiss. I want everyone to love me. That's impossible too and that's okay, I think."

^I am so not looking forward to this movie. I'm not sure if this is the real poster or not but I do know it is becoming a movie and this makes me angry because Hollywood has such a talent for ruining most of my favorite books for me. whatever. I'll probably end up seeing it anyway. 

"I think they pity me. 'She's just not pretty enough for a real boy.' I return the look, knowing that they're different. I pity them. They're just not real enough to be pretty." 

"Lies and cigarettes. They taste sour, bitter, unreal. They don't taste like you."

"I think I loved you so much because you were so beautiful, the kind no one else could see. They couldn't get past your dorky haircut, thick square glasses, pudgy arms and waist. Your short sleeved checkered shirts and pleated pants. You were such a nerd. I loved you because everyone thought you were so ugly on the outside but you were so good on the inside. So many people love you now because you are beautiful on the outside. Your waist narrowed, shoulders broadened, lips curving into a convincing smile. The haircut and new glasses didn't hurt either. But if your outsides are so beautiful now, then what do your insides look like?"

"I tell him he is going to fall in love and he takes it as a threat or a curse. I'm not sure which."

"His heart remains untouched. New. Shiny. If you opened his ribcage it would smell like new car. There would be an air freshener hanging from the sternum."

question - Zoe writes that she thinks everyone falls in love the same way, that love is wonderful but it is not unique. Do you think this is true? Do we all fall in love the same way or is each time different? 

I want to say each time is different. I think it feels so special at the time we think that no one in the world could have ever possibly been as happy as we were, but they probably have been. 

much love.

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