Welcome to my text collection. I don't know what else to call it, cause it's all varied, but it is all text. Scroll to read passages either from people or poetry or posts. Some even have pictures. Fair warning some quotes may contain adult subject matter.

To paint a bit of background: I have always been very shy, introverted, and fucking terrible at connecting with others. I was comfortable with my alone-ness, though.

I've always been a bit (of a lot) of a closet romantic, so I can't really remember any long period of time since the fourth grade when I didn't have a crush on someone. But mostly, those were either boys I never even talked to, and just obsessed with from a distance. (When I was 18, I once waited for an hour in the evening, in the dead of winter, because I knew my crush would eventually wait for the bus at the same bus stop, so I'd get to look at him from a distance for about 6 minutes.) Or celebrities-musicians, actors, any kind of face to put to my ridiculous, constant fantasies of romantic love, and keep a safe, peaceful emotional outlet for my feelings.

I was ridiculously delusional, and pathetic, but I was happy.

- Ask Polly: Help, I'm The Loneliest Person In The World!

NONE OF US ARE GOING TO HELL!

You guys are going to be stoked.

I just finished reading the Bible (The word of God which is meant to be taken completely literally) and guess what? Can you guess? OKAY I'll just tell you.

There are literally NO rules about meth. If you're a "Drunkard" you will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven but there is nothing at all about being a tweaker. That is both old and new Testaments. You heard it here first. The Bible Part I & II both have no commandments, laws, rules or anything about crystal methamphetamine. Not even listed as being a sin. Not even a MINOR sin.

I don't know how but somehow we managed to fly right under God's radar. That's God the Father AND Jesus Christ. I don't even think they know about it LOL. I checked to see if there's a third Testament and there isn't. The New Testament is the latest from God so...yeah...none of us are going to hell. I mean I don't know what sins y'all commit while you're on meth but meth itself is fine.

I don't know about you guys but I feel a lot better. I thought for sure God would be upset about this cause I mean...He really doesn't like a lot of fun stuff. GAWD I hope God doesn't see this post LMAO

We're going to heaven!

-r/meth

I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.
― Charles Bukowski

in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what an event had meant. A myth was an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time.

Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality.

An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience. We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity.

Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dance, drugs, sex or sport. Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.

-Karen Armstrong (A Short History of Myth)

There is a Buddhist monk who collects Comme des Garçons religiously. Once a month, Tsuzuki told me, the monk sheds his robes, dons Comme des Garçons' avant-garde constructionist clothes, and heads from his temple to Tokyo to pick up a few more pieces. He is so convinced of their miraculous powers that he says his delinquent sister cleaned up her act when she started wearing Comme des Garçons. There's an English teacher at a prep school who started wearing Gianni Versace's flamboyant designs to keep the attention of his students. After ten years, he had one hundred pieces of Versace as well as an impressive Bulgari jewelry collection. He lives in a shoebox apartment with his unemployed girlfriend, who spends her days organizing the collection. There's a Tom Ford collector (she has both Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent), an Armani man, a McQueen girl, and a Martin Margiela manic who is so fastidious about his collection that he never cooks at home because he doesn't want the clothes to retain the odors. The only thing in his refrigerator is eyedrops. 'When he gets thirsty,' Tsuzuki said, 'he goes to the convenience shop and drinks there then goes back home. He does not want to put any kind of trash in the room."

-Dana Thomas, Deluxe (How Luxury Lost Its Luster)

But perhaps God is strong enough to
exult in monotony. It is possible that
God says every morning, "Do it again"
to the sun; and every evening,
"Do it again" to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity
that makes all daisies alike; it may
be that God makes every daisy
separately, but has never got tired of
making them. It may be that He has
the eternal appetite of infancy; for we
have sinned and grown old, and
our Father is younger than we.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Temporary Job

Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be
grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me,
like this room I lived in for eleven days,
how I learned the way the sun laid its palm
over the side window in the morning, heavy
light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.
- Minnie Bruce Pratt

Vomiting is the last true zen state that a person can experience: a moment where nothing else in the world matters, total thoughtless focus.

Shitting is supposed to be that too but phones have ruined it. nobody is on their phone while puking and if they are then God has truly lost.

Salvage by Hedgie Choi

I have seen deer
split open on the
road and thought

that’s exactly what
those

soft and gentle
fuckers

deserve.

Some things happened
to me in my formative
years that I don’t
want to tell you about
but some things
happened to you too.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch,
the red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head,
I see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her,
its sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

- Sharon Olds

As I was walking up to the church
this morning, I passed that row of big
oaks by the war memorial if you remember
them—and I thought of another morning, fall
a year or two ago, when they were
dropping their acorns thick as hail almost.
There was all sorts of thrashing in the
leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement
so hard they’d fly past my head. All
this in the dark, of course. I remember
a slice of moon, no more than that.
It was a very clear night, or morning,
very still, and then there was such energy
in the things transpiring among those trees, like
a storm, like travail. I stood there a
little out of range, and I thought,
It is all still new to me.
I have lived my life on the prairie
and a line of oak trees can still astonish me
- Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

Beyond Harm

A week after my father died suddenly I understood
his fondness for me was safe – nothing
could touch it. In that last year,
his face would sometimes brighten when I would
enter the room, and his wife said
that once, when he was half asleep,
he smiled when she said my name. He respected
my spunk – when they tied me to the chair, that time
they were tying up someone he respected, and when
he did not speak, for weeks, I was one of the
beings to whom he was not speaking,
someone with a place in his life. The last
week he even said it, once,
by mistake. I walked into his room
‘How are you’ and he said ‘I love you
too.’ From then on, I had
that word to lose. Right up to the last
moment, I could make some mistake, offend him,
and with one of his old mouths of disgust he could
re-skew my life. I did not think of it much,
I was helping to take care of him,
wiping his face and watching him.
But then, a while after he died,
I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed – he was dead, dead!

-Sharon Olds

Seeing a Dog in the Rain

It is raining and

there is a dog lying

in the gutter and the

gutter is filling with water

because the sewer is clogged.

If the dog were alive he

would be drowning

but as it is, the water is simply

stroking his fur.

- Laura Gilpen

Names

She was Eliza for a few weeks

When she was a baby

-Eliza Lily. Soon it changed to Lil.

Later she was Miss Steward in the baker's shop

And then 'my love', 'my darling', Mother.

Widowed at thirty, she went back to work

As Mrs Hand.

Her daughter grew up,

Married and gave birth.

Now she was Nanna.

Everybody Calls me nanna,' she would say to visitors.

And so they did - friends, tradesmen, the doctor

In the geriatric ward

They used the patients' Christian names.

'Lil, we said, 'or Nanna,"

But it wasn't in her file

And for those last bewildered weeks

She was Eliza once again.

-Wendy Cope

I know she was loved

I was watching her, my beautiful friend

she was dancing in a way I knew I never could -

I had seen myself dance before, stupidly, I

had watched a video of it, arms flailing, arms awkward, arms

arms like vines.

I know she took dance lessons as a child but

so did I

and this does not explain her confidence

I know she was loved.

I know she was loved.

As a child I raised my hand in class ran

wild, ran and yelled and tried new things

I was not afraid to fail then

at some point I learned the language of disappointment and

disappointing and gained a fear, a pride.

Then I was quiet and I was good and I was obedient.

But deflecting attention only gets you so far it is

deeply alienating, the mask can only be so thick

before it pulls your skin off.

Before you are naked and vulnerable

that is how I felt on that dance floor she said,



don't be shy, nobody's watching



I wanted to say. I am watching

I am not shy I am mortified. There are times when the person staring back at you

through the mirror is unrecognisable and

there are times when you should be having fun

but instead you are wishing

that your arms were not your arms.

-Sue Zhao

Abel's Body to Cain

I know.

I know you know what you've done to me.

I know your days are blackened ash and briar.

I know that you are lost now in the dust.

Listen: there are words to say that can change us.

Will you say them? Will you live them?

Will you be them?

Brother,

I, too, have done harm in this one life.

Look up at the starlight in the darkness.

Even the dark stars get to shine awhile.

Come, then. Come home again and lie with me.

Tell me we are not what we have done.

-Joseph Fasano

Visiting My Mother's College

This is where her body was

when it was sealed, her torso clear and whole, she walked on these lawns. Curled as the Aesop fox she sat in a window-seat, it

makes me sick with something like desire to think of her, my first love-when I lay stunned

in her arms, I thought she was the whole world, heat, smooth flesh, colostrum,

and that huge heartbeat. But here she had no children, no husband, and her mother was dead, no one was far weaker or far stronger than she, she carried her rage unknown, hidden, unknowable yet, she moved, slowly, under the arches, literally singing. Half of me was deep in her body, dyed egg with my name on it, in cursive script maybe the most serene time of my life, as I glided above the gravel paths there near the center of her universe.

I have come here to walk on the stones she walked on, to sit in the fragrant chapel with its pews rubbed with the taken combs of bees, its stained, glassy God, I want to

love her when she has not hurt anyone yet, when all that had been done to her she held, still, in her fresh body, as she lay on her stomach, still a child, studying diligently for finals, and before the dance she washed her hair and rinsed it with lemon and shook and shook her head so the interior of her tiny room was flecked with sour bright citrus.

-Sharon Olds

I remember paging through the Ojibwe dictionary she sent, trying to decipher the tiles, but the spellings didn’t always match and the print was too small and there are way too many variations on a single word and I was feeling that this was just way too hard. The threads in my brain knotted and the harder I tried, the tighter they became. Pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word—a verb, of course: “to be a Saturday.”

Pfft! I threw down the book. Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun. I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: “to be a hill,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: “to be a bay.” “Ridiculous!” I ranted in my head. “There is no reason to make it so complicated. No wonder no one speaks it. A cumbersome language, impossible to learn, and more than that, it’s all wrong.

A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.” I was ready to give up. I’d learned a few words, done my duty to the language that was taken from my grandfather. Oh, the ghosts of the missionaries in the boarding schools must have been rubbing their hands in glee at my frustration. “She’s going to surrender,” they said.

And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live.

“To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.

To be a hill “to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.

-Robin Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass)

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

- Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

Why Some Girls Love Horses

And then I thought, Can I have more
of this, would it be possible
for every day to be a greater awakening: more light,
more light, your face on the pillow
with the sleep creases rudely
fragmenting it, hair so stiff
from paint and sheet rock it feels
like the dirty short hank
of mane I used to grab on Dandy’s neck
before he hauled me up and forward,
white flanks flecked green
with shit and the satin of his dander,
the livingness, the warmth
of all that blood just under the skin
and in the long, thick muscle of the neck—
He was smarter than most of the children
I went to school with. He knew
how to stand with just the crescent
of his hoof along a boot toe and press,
incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain
so surprising when it came,
its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive
sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof
pinned one’s foot completely to the ground,
we’d have to beat and beat him with a brush
to push him off, that hot
insistence with its large horse eye trained
deliberately on us, to watch—


Like us, he knew how to announce through violence
how he didn’t hunger, didn’t want
despite our practiced ministrations: too young
not to try to empathize
with this cunning: this thing
that was and was not human we must respect
for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because
I could not love him anymore
in the ways I’d taught myself,
watching the slim bodies of teenagers
guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring
as if they were one body, one fluid motion
of electric understanding I would never feel
working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing
had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed
an indifference that gave me
logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting
the hand placed on back or shoulder
and never feel the desired response.
I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine


and inflict on me, the sudden jerking
of head away from halter, the tentative nose
inspecting first before it might decide
to relent and eat. I loved
what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me
it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure
might be blended, one warmth
bleeding into another as the future
bleeds into the past, more light, more light,
your hand against my shoulder, the image
of the one who taught me disobedience
is the first right of being alive.

- Paisley Rekdal

Thanks to Girl Wonderlust for this recommendation :)