warm and vunerable
June 2013
327 posts
“A friend of a friend once described romantic love as being mesmerized with another person’s uniqueness. It relatively rarely happens that your brain reorganizes everything to interpret someone as wonderful all the way down to their flaws. It is rare we get to appreciate anyone that thoroughly and with so much enchantment. It’s, honestly, a terribly neat thing that I just love experiencing. I love loving. It’s an invigorating, enthralling, and richly appreciative way to think and feel about someone or something. As Nietzsche once put it, “we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving”. That describes my love of life, if no one else’s.
So, I never stop loving any of the women I loved. I rarely think about most of them. I almost never think of getting back with them. I don’t pine for them. My love for them never disrupts my next relationships or makes me love a new person with any less rapturous infatuation or commitment. But I’ll always love them. I love loving them. I love remembering them and what they meant to me. I love having people who when I think about them, I can find their uniqueness still mesmerizing in a way that never completely wears off. I love that there are people that I can think about and always have this twinge of fascination, however muted with time and distance.” —“He Stopped Loving Her Today” (via onlytheilluminatisurvive)
So, I never stop loving any of the women I loved. I rarely think about most of them. I almost never think of getting back with them. I don’t pine for them. My love for them never disrupts my next relationships or makes me love a new person with any less rapturous infatuation or commitment. But I’ll always love them. I love loving them. I love remembering them and what they meant to me. I love having people who when I think about them, I can find their uniqueness still mesmerizing in a way that never completely wears off. I love that there are people that I can think about and always have this twinge of fascination, however muted with time and distance.” —“He Stopped Loving Her Today” (via onlytheilluminatisurvive)
“Taking something for granted means to assume that it is permanent. Nothing in this world of form is permanent. When you really get that into your head and heart, and come to accept it, enormous gratitude for what is here becomes possible.”
—The Lazy Yogi (via lazyyogi)
“My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have ever had.”
—Søren Kierkegaard (via hellanne)
“Don’t you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which ‘I am’ is timelessly present. Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels that disturbs. Avoid the disturbance, that is all.”
—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (via lazyyogi)
“I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
—Maya Angelou (via sadfag)
“The messages you received from your family or your childhood experiences may have caused you to believe that assertiveness is unacceptable or even dangerous. Practice saying the following: I have the right to be treated with respect by others. I have the right to express my feelings and opinions. I have the right to say no without feeling guilty. I have the right to ask for what I want. I have the right to make my own mistakes. I have the right to pursue happiness.”
—Nice Girl Syndrome by Beverly Engel (via speakoutbeheard)
“Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal. Now is your time. Walk closely with people you love. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep travelling honestly along life’s path.”
—Street Smarts: A Learning Process: 11 Things to Know at 25(ish)
“People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.”
—William Trevor (via theparisreview)
“I suffered, I learned, I changed.”
—(via onlytheilluminatisurvive)
“I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”
—Richard Feynman (via larmoyante)
“More than rich and more than famous, I wanted to be great.”
—Bruce Springsteen (via everysinglenite)
“And I am jealous
of your tattoos and how long
they will stay with you
after I go.” —Clementine von Radics (via funeraire)
of your tattoos and how long
they will stay with you
after I go.” —Clementine von Radics (via funeraire)
“Imagine a good gambler who is playing an important poker hand, the way he lays his cards down makes all the difference. With a certain number of cards, a certain number of the enemy are falling off their chairs, so the sequence of the cards can often determine who wins the hands. A writer needs to play his hand very carefully; he doesn’t need to play fifty-two card pickup with the reader and throw the whole deck in his face just because he’s got control of the deck. That’s not playing cards at all.”
—Thomas McGuane (via theparisreview)
“Be honest, brutally honest. That is what’s going to maintain relationships.”
—Lauryn Hill (via 5ft1)
