"So the Midwest nourishes us and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters, and the forested river valleys with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities."

No one writes with quite the feeling that Annie Dillard does. Having grown up in the Midwest, this passage is particularly special to me because it rings so, so true.

My fave poem is The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe. The poem, to me, is pure beauty!

Who can think of words like these? I love it! :D

"In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you--on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck--even then. And afterwards--perhaps most of all afterwards--I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B...without looking, or, without lifting the pencil...or in some other way...we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden."

-Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov.

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic


Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly


we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.


(So,when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)

-e.e. cummings

This thread needs more love.

"My fingers reach through the screen and comb through the garbage until they find the home of the shrieking chorus, hungry girls singing endless anthems while our throats bleed and rust and fill up with loneliness. I could scroll through these songs for the rest of my life and never find the beginning." - Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum." - Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"I sat thinking how terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as incredible as living. One day we suddenly take the fact that we exist for granted - and then, yes, then we don’t think about it anymore until we are about to leave the world again." - The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

"…and I looked and looked at her, and knew clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else." - Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness." - On the Road by Jack Kerouac

"I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else." - Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and - in spite of True Romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely - at least, not all the time - but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness." - The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955 - 1967 by Hunter S. Thompson

I was sitting in my room, dark and gray and crying
Someone in my life I fear was at the point of dying
A cold wind blew right up my spine, it was the break of dawn
A little voice way deep inside told me she was gone
Oh... This house is haunted
Oh... That's how I want it to be
Oh... This house is haunted
You can always stay here with me...
No more singing, no more laughing, no more sunny days
She left and took the colours with her, buried in her grave
This is where we climbed the tower, this is where she fell
Then when her young heart stopped beating, I went to hell
Oh... This house is haunted
Oh... Ha....
Oh... This house is haunted
Ho.. . Oh...
You float through the lining room, I watch my TV
I feel you sit down on the couch right here next to me
The I feel you lips touch mine just like we used to do
I'm so happy all alone being here with you...

Alice Cooper

"I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more." - The Castle by Franz Kafka

"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." - What is the What by Dave Eggers

"Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die."

"And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide."

-The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962.

(I'm having a real Sylvia Plath thing at the moment.)

"Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement." - The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton.

"Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run. . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . ." - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson.