"They stayed in the bedroom for half an hour or so, talking, looking at the things, talking: and Clara remembered thinking at the time that it was just such a honeysuckle-filtered, sunny, conversational afternoon that would in years to come, whatever those years might bring, cause her the most sad and exquisite nostalgia. She was sad in advance, and yet at the same time all the happier, doubly happy, for knowing that she recognised her happiness, that it was not slipping by her unheeded, for knowing that she was creating for herself a past."

- Jerusalem the Golden, Margaret Drabble

"Death is a bad way to fix something that's broken," Jean said, her own heart pounding.

"I know." He took a deep breath, still staring at the stars. "I've seen the way you look at that girl. Mindy is her name? You love her?"

"We're married," Jean said. "We... grew up together."

James smiled, slow and bitter. "Milly and I were the same. She never did look quite like the others, but it wasn't until her teens that she made the full change. It was real hard on her. Hard on me too, I guess."

"But you made it," Jean whispered.

"Sure did. She wouldn't want this. Me, thinking about dying. I can't help it, though. I'm alone out here, and those people in town... even if one of them did find me, they wouldn't bury me here at her side. They would take me away to the cemetery. Heck, I don't even know what to do about Dog."

He looked at Jean so very solemn she wanted to cry. "Be careful, son, when you get older. Take care of the people you love. Find some good friends. The kind who will watch over you after you've gone. You don't want to end up like me."

"Was it such a bad life?" she whispered, trying to imagine James and Milly, both alive and full of love in that little four-room house.

"No," he breathed.

"I wouldn't trade it for anything."

- X-Men: Dark Mirror, Marjorie M. Liu

stars25: II

With you a part of me hath passed away;

For in the peopled forest of my mind

A tree made leafless by this wintry wind

Shall never don again its green array.

Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,

Have something of their friendliness resigned;

Another, if I would, I could not find,

And I am grown much older in a day.

But yet I treasure in my memory

Your gift of charity, your mellow ease,

And the dear honour of your amity;

For these once mine, my life is rich with these.

And I scarce know which part may greater be,—

What I keep of you, or you rob of me.

Stanza II of The Peopled Forest Of My Mind by George Santayana for W.P.

stars25

I said perhaps Patagonia, and pictured

a peninsula, wide enough
for a couple of ladderback chairs
to wobble on at high tide. I thought

of us in breathless cold, facing
a horizon round as a coin, looped
in a cat’s cradle strung by gulls
from sea to sun. I planned to wait

till the waves had bored themselves
to sleep, till the last clinging barnacles,
growing worried in the hush, had
paddled off in tiny coracles, till

those restless birds, your actor’s hands,
had dropped slack into your lap,
until you’d turned, at last, to me.

When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant

skies all empty aching blue. I meant
years. I meant all of them with you.

Patagonia - Kate Clanchy

thank you.

Chained to the wall of our room.
Yeah you chained me like a dog in our room.
I thought that's how it was
I thought that we were fine.
Then the day was night.
You were high, you were high when I was doomed
and dyin' for... with no life, with no light.

Tied to my bed.
I was younger then,
I had nothing to spend but time on you.
But it made me love, it made me love, it made me love more.
It made me love, it made me love, it made me love more.

Do what you said.
The words she said left out.
Over into the sky where I'll soon fly.
And she took the time to believe in,
to believe in what she said.
She made me love, she made me love, she made me love more.
She made me love, she made me love, she made me love more.

- Love More, Sharon Van Etten.

how i'm feeling these days.

“Say something. You’re my only friend here, it’ll be a memento. I don’t like pictures.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Whatever. Anything from the heart, even something sad. I’ll take it to the end of the world.”

He stared after him. 

His face was silent, closed, yet sickly fascinating; it thus drew in the confidences of Turmoil and Pain, themselves the underlings of Loneliness, an Overlord so pervasive, its tendrils marauded across his features, seeking to fester, germinate and eventually, vanquish that fragile mien.

wrote this a year or two ago, and to be honest, i wrote with unabashed and utter self-centredness. i find it heavily overwrought now but it doesn't matter, because i've found him - the man with the silent, closed, sickly fascinating face. i want him.

Tony Leung in Happy Together, 1997.

"'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'

'Why?'

'It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'

'Why not?'

'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'

'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? ... Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal.'

... He could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

'I don't know - I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.'

'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.'

'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.'

'Do you see any evidence that this is happening? Or any reason why it should?'

'No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe - I don't know, some spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome.'"

- 1984, George Orwell