Baby, I love your mind.

I often wish that i had a chandelier hanging from my ceiling, but instead of thousands of sparkling crystals swinging, there would be thousands and thousands of sparkling words. Words that shine brighter than cut glass. Here are a few quotes, specifically by writers, and by writers that have often spoken right deep into me.

"I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love. "
-Dave Eggers

"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."
-Sylvia Plath

"The past beats inside me like a second heart."
-John Banville

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition.”
-Graham Greene

"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."
- Ted Hughes

"I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep."
- Dave Eggers

And the last words to Joan, the classiest of girls, oh I love her.

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

-Joan Didion

"A Certain Weariness" by Pablo Neruda

I don't want to be tired alone,
I want you to grow tired along with me.

How can we not be weary of the kind of fine ash which falls on cities in autumn,
something which doesn't quite burn,
which collects in jackets and little by little settles,
discolouring the heart.

 I'm tired of the harsh sea and the mysterious earth.
I'm tired of chickens -- we never know what they think,
and they look at us with dry eyes as though we were unimportant.

 Let us for once--I invite you-- be tired of so many things,
of awful aperitifs, of a good education.

Tired of not going to France,
tired of at least one or two days in the week which have always the same names
like dishes on the table,
and of getting up--what for? -- and going to bed without glory.

Let us finally tell the truth:
we never thought much of these days that are like houseflies or camels.
I have seen some monuments raised to titans,
to donkeys of industry.
They're there, motionless,
with their swords in their hands on their gloomy horses.
I'm tired of statues.
Enough of all that stone.

If we go on filling up the world with still things, how can the living live?
I am tired of remembering.
 I want men, when they're born, to breathe in naked flowers,
fresh soil, pure fire, not just what everyone breathes.
Leave the newborn in peace! Leave room for them to live!
Don't think for them, don't read them the same book;
let them discover the dawn and name their own kisses.

I want you to be weary with me of all that is already well done,
of all that ages us.
Of all that lies in wait to wear out other people.

Let us be weary of what kills
and of what doesn't want to die.

I carry your heart in me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

-- E. E. Cummings

Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hand

-- E. E. Cummings

The fray

These nights of youth run fraying now -
Careful stitched seams
rough rended in the dark
of love and disregard.

Fresh hearts arrive like parcels
in the daily post -
We tear apart and throw away
the ones we love the most.

These nights of youth,
all swinging and bright -
Like so many strung out yellow lights
that fade to nothing with the sun.

The headaches are eternal now,
our keepsakes mostly lost.
Like fraying hem, time proves us,
we all will come undone.

Pictures of you

Life is at its closest to art when I awake inside this quiet lover's tangle, and ponder the open face of the next two hours at least. Here, right there beside me, is the wondrously touchable outcome of all the bumbling messes in the daily toss and fro. These mornings, that follow the fizzy bright yesternights of shiny eyes and exaggerated gestures, they are the meaty heart of the art of things, the times to believe that all of life could be naked, true and never boring. The rises and falls of a pretty young face, the thud, thud, thud of artery thick with life I hardly know, a whole streaming system of mystery. There is no picture in all of Europe more lovely to contemplate. They could be Gods of anything.