The State of the Union happened.
Look. Either you get art or you don’t.
Across the pond, something called Page 3 is about to be slightly less sexist. Yay?
David Swerdlick, of The Root, spent the day with Dr. Ben Carson who is poised to run for president. If he were elected, we would have two black presidents in a row. Can you imagine how much shit racists would lose? Don’t vote for Carson, to be clear, as he is conservative (not a bad thing) and doesn’t have women’s best interests at heart (a very bad thing). Still…
If you want a better idea about what Ben Carson sees as the driving force behind his presidential campaign-in-waiting, perhaps look no further than Carson’s own explanation for his rise in popularity on the conservative political circuit: “It’s not so much me as it is the courage to say what needs to be said.”
Have you been targeted by online harassment? If so, there’s help out there.
A bad ass woman owns one of the biggest bail bond agencies in New York. I want to stride into rooms. Is there a place where we can learn to do that?
Wearing high-heeled boots and flanked by two bodyguards, Michelle Esquenazi strode into the classroom and took a seat in front of 30 or so sleepy teenagers. It was a cloudless morning in November, and the owner and president of Empire Bail Bonds was invited to speak at Wellington C. Mepham, a public high school in Bellmore, Long Island. Her subject was supposed to be the criminal justice system, but she seemed more interested in scaring the kids straight.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adhichie has a new short story up at Matter.
How softly the rain fell that Monday morning when my water broke. Because I was used to the raging downpours of Lagos, this quiet patter calmed me, filled me with peace. My husband Omoregie was at work and so our neighbor took me to the hospital, my dress slightly damp, my heart full of expectation. My firstborn child.
Just FYI, your reading is being tracked. NBD I guess.
Lately, I’ve been reading Vanity Fair, and among the profound pleasures it provides is the mysterious, almost indescribable sensation of being alone with Becky Sharp and her coterie of unfortunate rivals and hapless admirers. Solitude is and has always been an essential component of reading; many children become readers in part to enjoy the privacy it offers. And in an age in which our email messages can be perused by the NSA and our Facebook posts are scanned for clues to our habits and our desires, what joy and a relief it is, to escape into a book and know that no one is watching. But now it turns out that someone or something may have been reading over my shoulder, that I haven’t been quite so alone as I’d imagined, that Becky and I and her circle may have had some silent, unsuspected, uninvited company.
Literature is responsible for a great many things including these words.
I’m a sucker for a good romantic line. Here are some from great books. What are your favorite romantic lines? Woo me.
Tags: link roundup, the internet is great mostly
I would 100% like to have coffe with Michelle Esquenazi.
Also, many mixed feelings about the “end” of page 3. Mainly because they’re still putting it online and the paper still has women on page three in bikinis, so has it really ended?
I’ve been following and supporting the no more page 3 campaign and your mixed feelings are pretty much what everyone is feeling. Yes it’s a start, but yes it’s also massively missing the whole point, which wasn’t ‘OMG nipples NO put a bra on and it’s all fine’, but ‘let’s not have saucy pictures in the newspapers’. The organisers of the campaign are certainly not saying the job is done!
Yeah I think it’s great that there’s been some change, but I think the point has kind of been missed. It seems like lots of people assume that others who don’t like Page 3 don’t like it because they don’t like naked bodies/are prudes etc. Perhaps some people dislike the page because of that reason, but I think to me the issue is more that it helps to instil the idea that women are decorative. Adding bikinis to cover up some nipples doesn’t really change that idea.
Getting rid of half naked people in newspapers would be the best way to stop it, but it seems unlikely that the Sun would do that. If the Sun added a Page 4 to show sexy men, at least they’d be equal opportunity objectifying – although I’m sure lots of Sun readers wouldn’t be too pleased!
They did have the ‘page 7 fella’ briefly back in the 80s? 90s? When I was too young to really pay attention to it. He didn’t last long.
Only 44.4 percent of British readers who use a Kobo eReader made it all the way through Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, while a mere 28.2 percent reached the end of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave.
That makes me feel a lot better that I’ve had an epub of Dostoyevski’s The Double open on my laptop for over a week and have barely glanced at it in that time.
That also makes me feel a lot better about how long it took me to slog through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. (so many words, so little happening!)
what if words, but too much
Man of all the good stuff about love in Harry Potter, they had to go with Snape’s creepo obsession with Lily?
I would have loved to see a line in there about the enduring power of familial love, but no! Snape! Because of course.
Yup, basically anything Dumbledore ever says about love, or simply “NOT MY DAUGHTER YOU BITCH” would have done nicely.
Or if they have to stick with romantic love, that semi-subtle bit in the 6th book about what the love potions smell like would do.
“ALWAYS” ISN’T EVEN A GOOD ROMANTIC LINE. IT IS A WORD.
Maybe it’s because I’m of the generation that used Harry Potter for the quotes in their high school yearbooks, but I KNOW FOR A FACT that JK wrote wayyyyy better things about love in those books.
Totally. Also I’m confused about the significance of “Always” because someone in the comments said “It’s so romantic, they had the same last words!” I’ve read the books approximately 1000 times and I’m pretty sure neither Snape or Lily’s last words were “always”. Did I miss something? Is that some dumb shit they did in the movie?
They definitely didn’t. Snape’s is after he’s dead, when Harry is looking at his memories in the Pensieve. And Lily’s is when she and James and Sirius and Lupin appear to Harry before he walks into the forest. Snape’s are “I have a plan…” and Lily’s are “You’ve been so brave…”
tl;dr Snape/Lily is creepy and people are wrong on the Internet
After some ~research~ I think it’s in reference to the fact that “Always” is the last thing we hear either of them say (Snape talking to Dumbledore in the memory flashback, Lily telling Harry she’ll stay close to him when he breaks out the resurrection stone) but it’s not either of their last words in the sense that, you know, last words are the last things you say before you die.
Also they’re said in completely different contexts so I think the Snape/Lily shippers (whoever those people are) are grasping for straws on that one. Now that I’ve thought about this, I just want to take the time to say for the thousandth time how annoyed I am that JK Rowling spent PAGES on Snape’s mostly creepy love for Lily and we NEVER REALLY got to see anything about how James and Lily actually got together #endrant
Ohhh. Yeah. Stupid. And I was just thinking the same thing! You hear all this theoretically “redeeming” stuff about Snape, but we never get anything concrete to show us that James wasn’t actually kind of a dick, other than Sirius and Lupin’s assurances that he grew up and changed.
Yes!! I wish JK Rowling would write a series about the Marauders & original Order of the Phoenix era!
OMG THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN
Exactly! For me at least it gave a very weird “Lily picked the wrong guy” kind of vibe, which I thought was totally unfair to James. And also Lily, like she didn’t *really* know how much Severus loved her. Lily and James forever! I WANT A STORY ON THEIR FIRST DATE ON POTTERMORE ASAP, PLEASE AND THANK YOU JK.
I pretend “Life During Wartime” is the story of them falling in love, and that he was kind of a dick, but sometimes a dick who is brave and protective, has brave, protective, and loyal friends, and has a private fortune is a lot more attractive during a genocidal war than during normal times. That is the timeline of the relationship, right? The war starts, and they start schtupping? (I looked it up as part of research for the next paragraph and no, the war was going on the whole time they were in school. Still.)
If Neville had been the chosen one, I think they would have divorced before Harry went to Hogwarts, and then Lily would have been a FABULOUS spinster. Just amazing. Probably would have done some stellar potions work.
Snape = Nice Guy
Unfortunately Rowling depicted his niceguyism sympathetically rather than deconstructing it. He could have been a sympathetic character with nuance, instead of a boring ol’ tragic hero.
And it’s not even the last words they say in those contexts either! I looked it up in my copy of DH!
Thank you for doing that, I am currently away from my DH copy!
Once again, proof that the movies were a sad, empty shell compared to the wonder that was the books.
I am for sure not a Snape/Lily shipper, but damn if “Always” didn’t make me bawl the first time I read TDH.
Fair enough. I don’t think Snape is ALL bad, it just bothers me when people see it as he was a totally great person the whole time. His story is very sad and unrequited love is very sad, but he’s still pretty douchey for ONLY caring about Lily’s life and there’s a very Nice Guy-ish undercurrent to it all that’s icky.
He really went out of his way to make life hell for an 11 year old kid who never did anything to him, which is pretty fucked up no matter how sad your own story is.
Oh, absolutely no argument from me there. His unrequited love for Lily and terrible treatment by James in no way makes up for how he treated young Harry. And it’s not even that “Always” redeems him for me. I think it’s just the context of the word within the chapter and what it meant that got me. (And let’s be honest, still gets me when I read it.)
It is so, so heartbreaking. Like, he lived a cruel and lonely life full of cruel and evil people, and there was one good thing in it, and he FUCKED IT UP, but damn if he’s not going to still cherish and uphold the ideals of that one good thing. Badly, often, because he’s had a shithole of a life and has poor life skills, and also the triple/quadruple agent thing requires cover.
Also I think he comes across as on the autism spectrum, and a lot of people on the spectrum end up identifying with villains because they share depression and isolation and difficulty with propriety. For once, when people identified with a villain, he turned out to be good, to be preserving a secret good core while sacrificing his ego entirely. When current treatment for autism focuses on pretending to be neurotypical forever, it’s a powerful message – that you can be a good person while hiding your true self from almost everyone.
That is one of the best analyses of Snape I have ever, ever read.
This is so well said. And I do think that Rowling didn’t necessarily mean for people to take “Snape was actually a PERFECT SECRET TRAGIC HERO” out of his story, the way many of them did. I think she was trying to show that few people are all good or all bad, which is why she painted Dumbledore and James and basically everyone with fatal flaws, and even humanized Voldemort in a lot of ways. Your nuanced interpretation I think is much closer to what she intended than the way most people read it.
Amen. It is NOT romantic that Snape is still obsessed with Lily after all these years! It is sad, and creepy, and a little pitiful.
I have had long-standing dreams of a feminist underground for the internet-stalked. Go Zoe Quinn!
Ben Carson is more than conservative, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. And I know that issues of race, privilege, and power are complex ones that often aren’t well-suited to easy discussion on the internet and such, but that guy, regardless of his background, supports policies and ideas that seem like they’d disproportionately affect people who are already disadvantaged by the US’s history of white supremacy.
As much as I’d like to see the old-fashioned racists shit themselves with terror at the idea of a second black president, at the end of the day, I think they’d be pretty happy with his policies. (Or, anyway, they’d be happy with his policies if they thought they’d been proposed by a white guy.)
Actually, wait, maybe it IS a good idea to elect him? He could propose a bunch of reactionary policies instead of Obama’s mildly-centrist, occasionally progressive ones, and the racists could reflexively oppose them, and then right wing politics would just collapse in confusion.
“Wait, do you guys want a flat tax or not?”
“Yes! We just don’t want HIS flat tax!”
“Is…is it because he’s black?”
“HOW DARE YOU BRING RACE INTO THIS AL SHARPTON”
GM Toast! I am up for a promotion 3+ months into my new thing, and I … dont actually want it? Its the first time in life this has ever happened as I’m usually a rabid ambition monster. What a strange new feeling! I’ve drafted my “after thorough consideration” email but haven’t … quite… sent it yet.
Thoroughly unsurprised that the term “cojones” would be coined by Hemingway as an allegorical representation of courage. How on earth can your testicles represent your courage when the slightest little tap turns you into the Cowardly Lion?
Rethink your metaphors, guys.
Gross gross gross.
I’m so confused as to how he could have coined it when it is…a Spanish…word? That afaik gets used much the way “balls” does in English? Shouldn’t he be credited with borrowing it, rather than coining it?
This is just a personal and possibly flawed interpretation, but I think that the chart was suggesting that he made first reference to the word as a literary metaphor for courage, bringing it into English vernacular with a meaning that extends beyond the original translation. So in Spanish, the definition of that word is testicles, literally. In English, the definition is masculine courage, figuratively.
Still though, I see what you mean, that’s definitely an Anglo-centric idea, that some white male English speaker is responsible for introducing a word that belongs to another language entirely.
Ugggggh Wuthering Heights and UGGGGGGH SNAPE AND LILY. WOOOOOOOOORST.
Current favorite romantic line? Gotta go with this one from Courtney Milan’s newest book “Trade Me”:
“‘One of these days though,’ Blake tells his father, ‘she’s going to realize that I think the sun rises on her smile.'”
SWOOOOOON.
BTW, you should all pick it up because A. the heroine is an amazing written first generation WOC, B. The whole book is about what it’s like to be poor in this country and C., the next book’s heroine is trans. Also, it’s Courtney so you KNOW it’s amazingly written.
I was reading that and wanted to go NO NO WUTHERING HEIGHTS IS NOT ROMANTIC NOOOOO
SAME THAT BOOK IS THE WORST
I am continually surprised that I did not throw that book across the room when I read it eons ago. I can only assume it’s my general protectiveness of books that saved it from such a fate.
Also it was probably a library book, so.
Oh, thank you for put that out in the open! I thought I was the only person who can’t. stand. that. book. It’s been my secret literary shame since my HS Eng teacher lauded it’s gothic existence. The image that pops into my mind is a gray, misty rain English day on rolling hills with a dour, menacing castle in the distance. Suddenly, a booming voice exclaims, “HEATHCLIIIIIIF”. Am I thinking of the god awful movie that we were forced to watch?
It was once summarized to me as “two sociopaths fall in love”, and that’s been my go-to since. Mind you, at least she could construct sentences and dialogue, so I did manage to *finish* it, unlike Twilight which I couldn’t deal with after about the 6th chapter.
Wow. Reading the summary on wikipedia indicates that I have forgotten/submerged almost the entirety of the book.
/Nelson laugh
I know, right, Wuthering Hights? Super romantic! I’m surprised they didn’t include Romeo and Juliet as well.
AHHH I READ THIS YESTERDAY AND I LAUGHED AND I CRIED AND I SQUEE’ED AND IT IS SO GOOD EVERYONE READ IT THIS IS AN OFFICIAL RECOMMENDATION FROM A LIBRARIAN
SO SO SO SO GOOD CAN WE JUST SIT HERE AND SQUEE ABOUT TINA AND BLAKE AND HER MOM’S CAKES AND MARIA AND EVERYTHING ABOUT IT THAT IS SO FREAKING AMAZING
AND TINA’S RESPONSE WHEN ADAM OFFERED HER MONEY AND OMG OMG OMG I CANNOT WAIT FOR MARIA’S BOOK WHY DOES IT NOT EXIST YET
YES, too much Wuthering Heights, and I love Wuthering Heights. “Wuthering Heights is the best book and it is not a love story” is the hill I will chose to die on any day.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit this (which is why I’m replying to your post rather than making my own new comment), but there was a really excellent line about love in one of the Divergent books. Like the main girl and the love interest boy didn’t just fall in love and then stay happily in love forever – they choose every day to be together and work for their relationship, and that’s what love is. I thought it was really lovely and also a great sentiment to include in a YA book, where so many others are not depicting realistic relationships for teenagers.
Psh, no shame in choosing a line from a YA book! Tris and Four’s relationship was one of the things I really liked about those books (I wasn’t a huge fan of a lot of the plot choices she made).
Beatrice and Benedict forever. “I do love nothing in the world so well as you – is not that strange?” is a line that’s far more in keeping with my experience and ability to speak of love than all this other earnestness.
I <3 Beatrice with an unparalleled fierceness. And they *are* my favourite Shakespeare couple.
BRB going to watch Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson kill it.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine
-Pablo Neruda
Oh man, Neruda, my heart. My parents made me see Il Postino when I was about eleven and it ruined my life.
He’s so good. SO. GOOD.
Romantic lines from literature + what would be day 1 of period = second day of three this week that I’m hiding tears at my desk THANKS ROXANE
This page is displaying broken for me. The text is wrapping/overlapping so that it’s impossible to read. Let me know if you want a screen cap.
Not just you.
I’m having the same issue!
Same. Maybe it’s because I Adblock, but I will never not Adblock
Me too, and I am not adblocked – also it wasn’t doing it when I made my last comment half an hour ago.
Just started for me, too.
Same. Tried in both chrome and firefox, no adblock. 🙁
I also don’t seem to be able to click on any links…
I’m not adblocking and this is happening to me! Using Chrome on a Mac. Can’t click on any of the links 🙁
same – and the first 5 links don’t work for me either.
Me too, blocking Adobe Flash in Firefox on a Mac
Same trouble here 🙁
Same here, no adblock, so it’s not that.
Issue seems to be that the Adhichie blockquote and everything after is not part of the same grouping (div element to be technical) as the stuff before that. I think it’s some weirdness with whatever blog composing software y’all use?
Yeah, it’s just this page, not any other post.
Yup. and I can’t click any links.
me too, in both Firefox and Chrome
I’m having the same issue on Chrome in Windows, with and without Adblock 🙁
me too! both in chrome and firefox
This happens to me pretty much every day. I don’t have Adblock and I tried disabling Java, like many commenters have suggested, but it didn’t make a difference. The only solution I have found is to constantly reload the page, and eventually it’ll show up normal.
The usual suggestion to disable Flash is if the page is very slow, I don’t think it generally is recommended as a fix for broken displaying, and I don’t think there’s any Java here. I suppose disabling JavaScript might help some problems, but it would definitely cause others.
Is it possible that you are using an older browser? If so, getting a newer browser might be the answer to your troubles. In general, not on this post, this post seems to be broken for everyone.
Thanks for this comment and your sensitivity to my not-knowing about computer stuff! A few weeks ago somebody posted tips in the comments about what to do — I think you’re right, it was disabling flash and Javascript — and it didn’t work for me. I use Chrome and it says it’s up-to-date. I think my internet connection might just not be very good, but I don’t have these kind of issues on any other sites.
If other people are still having problems (I am) what worked for me was going to View > Page Style > No Style in Firefox. It’s very Web 1.0, but I can click links and everything.
This line from the Fault in Our Stars really does it for me,
“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
Isn’t that how Hemingway (or Fitzgerald?) says people go bankrupt? Or is that the joke?
It’s roughly similar but it’s not a quote or a joke. From The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
I am saving that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie story for tonight at home. Plan on savoring it – Americanah was one of my favorite books I read last year.
As for the page 3 issue: somehow, if suddenly “page 4” started to feature a hot man in a thong every day, dudes might suddenly get a little uncomfortable too.
This is my favorite, always:
“Lord Peter Wimsey: “Placetne, magistra?”
Harriet Vane: “Placet.””
This made my years of Virgil worthwhile. So subtle, so sweet, so romantic in just a few words. Masterful.
I was always fond of the Wimsey/Vane love story…
And now I’m disappointed clicking on the Buzzfeed list because I thought they had included Wimsey/Vane in it.
Well, yes. That is the best thing.
What about (and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t have my copy of Busman’s Honeymoon with me)
Vane: I know–my instinct is always to hide in a corner.
Wimsey–You’re my corner, and I’ve come to hide.
YES. I love that line.
Oh, Ben Carson. He recently headlined a weekend conference at a mega Baptist church here in Houston. Dark days are ahead. But news recently broke that he plagiarized some of his recent book (and didn’t know even in college what plagiarism was!), so hopefully he won’t be too great a threat.
That book nearly killed me–how was it on so many ‘best’ lists? I just wanted everyone to die.
I don’t know! That’s exactly how I felt about it. Every character is a monster but in a really tedious way.
good one!
I wish I had gotten here earlier because because, yes, being “conservative” is a bad thing. Love you Roxanne, but don’t be nice to these motherfucking idiots, they do not motherfucking deserve it.
ETA: The word “motherfucking”, twice, for emphasis.
Yup yup yup. I feel like there’s this pervasive idea that we’re supposed to be “open to other beliefs than ours”, and I’m just not and don’t think I should be. Especially because it often manifests with people who are like “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative” as if that means we have the same values but differing views about economics, when really what it means is “I want my gay friends to be allowed to get married but poor people can go to hell”
Yeah, I’m so sick of this shit, saying you are “socially liberal, and fiscally conservative” just say what you fucking mean “I CARE MORE ABOUT MY MONEY THAN YOUR RIGHTS AS A HUMAN BEING SORRY/NOT SORRY”. Fuck. Them. All.
It took me so long to realize this. I always thought, “Well, socially liberal but fiscally conservative isn’t such a bad thing, right?” and then I realized that “fiscally conservative” just means cutting safety nets and essential services, and just no. No.
And I have friends with whom I disagree on economic policy, in that we have different ideas on the most efficient, effective way to use government funds to create social programs. But we start from the shared belief that social programs are good.
So basically, it’s good to be open to different ideas, but not to different valuations of human worth.
I’m perfectly willing to be open to other beliefs so long as those beliefs don’t entail shitting on other people and then making excuses for said shit.
HA! I had an urge to disagree w you and then… Nope nope nope you’re right, im wrong, proceed.
Look at you, being thoughtful for even a brief second! You must be one of them libruls usin thinkin muscles like a socialist
Ha, I hate that I even hesitated to add the word “motherfucker”. But then I did, and I felt better.
Also, DAMMIT, I can’t edit, but sorry I couldn’t manage to spell your name right Roxane.
“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something” from Eleanor and Park. It’s the only one I can think of, but I’ve got loads because I’m a huge weepy wimp.
I fucking loved that book.
This 90-year-old woman is a Silicon Valley designer of products for older adults. Also, my new role model.
This is great! Thank you!
The whole link round up is showing up in a gray box with an ad in the middle and the some of the pull quotes running over the body text on the left? Just me?
I think there may be a rogue div tag somewhere…
For me too.
“I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”
– Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
lorrie mooooore, gosh, she has such a way with words.
Did anyone else note that in the bail bond article, the man who stole cadaver bones (sometimes from people with AIDS and cancer) and sold them to be used for transplants DIED OF BONE CANCER?! Am I going to have to believe in karma now?
hahahaha yup noticed that too, completely perfect
That bail article was fascinating. You know, I’d never understood how bails work until now. I like the observation that the author made about personal decisions vs. structural changes, how the employees (often ex-cons) justify their own bootstraps theory.
Also, that woman is definitely a non-journalist incarnation of Freddy Lounds (from the Hannibal show).
One of my favourite romantic poems is this one by Rilke:
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me — the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods–
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house– , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,–
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…
Those last 3 lines remind me of a line from Lolita – “The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries” – and I know it’s super gross to associate genuine romance and Lolita but hey, I think it’s a nice sentence.
Bonus romantic poem for French-reading Toasties!
Truth, though. I’m starting to think about stuff to read at the wedding and Rilke is high on the list.
“You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing.”
swoooooon
Thank you for both of these. I’d never read anything by Robert Desnos before. Taken together they make a beautiful sad little diptych of poems about absence.
A bit late in the day, but a quote that I like from The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman:
“I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight… “
This is one of my favorites as well 🙂
I will always have a little shard in my heart that pierces me when I read His Dark Materials. <3
After I tore through the last quarter of that book in one sitting, I couldn’t even cry. I just sat there and stared at nothing for like an hour, dumbfounded.
So good. It couldn’t have ended any other way, and yet. And yet.
“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
-Pablo Neruda]
I mean COME ON, don’t you just want someone to make you bloom?
And also, Kiss of the Sun by Mary Ruefle always and forever means love to me:
If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant’s tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crown with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like such a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
as if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.
Hild has a treasure trove of great lines. re: love and (especially) lust. This one being my favorite.
“Not exactly love, but It’s like, I feel like a leaf on a river pouring over a fall — I’m being hurried along, then sucked under. I look at his arms and his shoulders and I’m drowning. I want to lick them, I want to gnaw at them like a teething puppy. No, not like a puppy, like a wolf. I want to tear him apart, eat him up. You can’t stop teeth from growing. I can’t wait years.”
“I will not be your weakness, Sean Kendrick.”
“It’s late for that, Puck.”
I re-read The Scorpio Races a LOT and I still sigh when I get to that line.
Yes I love that line as well! I have heard people say that there isn’t ENOUGH lovey-stuff in that book, and I wonder if we read the same book. It’s all there, between the lines, in how they act and the things they say.
I read those romantic lines and then had to lie down and swoon for a while. I’m awfully tired of being single.
“Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.” from I Capture the Castle
Being conservative is not bad? Huh?
I am so late to this, but I was thinking of this quote recently:
“I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself.” -Jeanette Winterson, The Passion.
That whole book is my idea of romantic literature.
The quote from Hamlet is a very odd choice.
Agreed. So many people seem to veer to one extreme or another of “how romantic, a noble, misunderstood hero!” or “Vile filth not fit to walk the earth, how dare people speak kindly of him?” I think Rowling was showing that even mean, cruel, dislikeable people can do good things–and on the flip side, that one does not have to be a nice person to be motivated by love.