Sunday, August 03, 2008
Until Your Heart Stops
"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Ethelinde at 1:12 am
Inconvenient Truth
"He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ethelinde at 12:59 am
Monday, July 14, 2008
From Him to Eternity
"[They] were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Ethelinde at 10:46 pm
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Hearts are Magnets
Pour R, ta lettre en souffrance.Kafka once asserted that our own writing betrays us because its truth is always contradictory, ambiguous and retrospective. Our truths, therefore, suffer in silence, undelivered, left in the dead-letter department. The real letter is the one we never actually write, or perhaps it's the letter that is never sent, awaiting the conclusion that never unfolds. Intimacy dissipates with communication. If there is too much explanation, it crumbles. One has to be discreet, brief, fleeting. The brevity, the evanescence, the sublime chime of human nature makes for a tantalising dance. Genuine intimacy is in the intermittent gesture. Modern love is likened to a consumer product, a monstrous commodity without a hint of charm, involving a constant need to communicate every apparent intimacy. Stripped of its specificity, the aura of love is a momentary one and it rapidly deteriorates.
Ethelinde at 12:19 pm
Sunday, December 31, 2006
So Great a Salvation
Faith, you give it to the people you love, but the people who really deserve it are the ones who come through even when you don't love them enough.Ethelinde at 11:09 pm
Thursday, September 07, 2006
This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours
What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over."As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name." - Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
Ethelinde at 6:38 pm
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Logic Will Break Your Heart
She woke one morning to discover that her life had been written invisibly, squashed between the facts. She had entrusted her heart, her soul, her entire being to him. When he betrayed her, he returned them to her. To her dismay, she found them torn and frayed. She no longer recognised herself and the sense of being was new and overwhelming."Throughout my lifetime I've left pieces of my heart here and there. And now there's almost not enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. There are no more white horses or pretty ladies at my door." – Johnny Depp, Blow
Ethelinde at 6:53 pm
Thursday, May 11, 2006
The Blanket Truth
It’s like being caught in a current, twisting me round and round. Suddenly, I find myself caught in a net, the accumulations of all my lifetimes just under the surface. The unconscious, it seems, will not let me go. My past accompanies me and occasionally kidnaps my present, so that all the distinctions I have depended upon for security disappear. It is a blur - my past, present, and future. When this happens, I am no longer sure who I am, or perhaps I can no longer pretend to be sure of who I am. Yet I cling faithfully to the clock, willing the hours to pass, certain I will move on, only to discover the clock is neither a raft or lifebelt. Rather, it is an horological illusion of progress. I tow people and things, emotions, time’s inhabitants with me.Ethelinde at 12:21 am
And Love Said, 'No'
I’m wide awake in a sleeping world. The world asleep in its coverlet of stars, not yet ready to wake up. I touched her face, her eyelids fluttering, tears beneath them, where the pain was. No more crying. No more pain. I will be tender as the night that covers up both your foolishness and mine. The world is real and it has hurt us. Signs, shadows, wonders… do you still believe in them, now that your multiple world has hardened into this brick wall?Ethelinde at 12:12 am