I descend, I try to tell the truth, but the primitive diving-bell that I call my consciousness is a more fallible instrument than the cheap thermometer in my fish-tank. I may not have a very bottom, I may be much shallower than I like to think, or I may be a creature of infinity, for now confined. My real world, as I fondly call it, may be the necessary cable that holds me in waters I can manage. Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies.
2 notesHer. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.
My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love.
The one is about you, the other about someone else. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion.
to love what death can touch. Anonymous
Keep your head clean and your heart pure. It’s more important to love than to be right.
And at the end of the day, real Love is always right.
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven by William Butler Yeats
Someone who loves you won’t always tell you the nicest things. They’ll tell you the truth; and then they’ll prove that they still love you anyway.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston HughesWhen you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “Gift From The Sea”So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all. Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook.
