my daily toast (tumblr)

Lena Dunham for Rachel Antonoff / Best Friends Fall 2013 (by garancedore)

for Shannon!!!!

I wanted to be a writer, that’s all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it’s all mixed up now. And I failed. I failed. No matter what you start with it ends up being so much less.

—ed harris, “the hours”

(Source: lovelifeeat.com)

Perhaps the very “otherness” of what I experience in California makes the place so rivetingly alive for me. The sheer inscrutable mysteriousness of the place from the banal — why are people so friendly at the grocery store? — to the unusual — the deeply unsettling experience of watching a distant hillside burst into flames — makes me aware of the high and low poetry of this place.

—Oh, California - NYTimes.com

What is the use of quotations? They have of, course, their practical applications for after-dinner speakers or for editorialists looking to buttress their arguments. They also make marvelous filler for otherwise uninspired conversations. But the gathering of such fragments responds to a much deeper compulsion. It resonates with the timeless desire to seize on the minimal remnant — the tiniest identifiable gesture — out of which the world could, in a pinch, be reconstructed. Libraries may go under, cultures may go under, but single memorizable bits of rhyme and discourse persist over centuries. Shattered wholes reach us in small disconnected pieces, like the lines of the poet Sappho preserved in ancient treatises. To collect those pieces, to extrapolate lost worlds from them, to create a larger map of the human universe by laying many such pieces side by side: this can become a fever, and one that has afflicted writers of all eras.

—Geoffrey O’Brien, “We Are What We Quote” — posting this is so meta

The first thing to understand about poetry is that it comes to you from outside you, in books or in words, but that for it to live, something from within you must come to it and meet it and complete it. Your response with your own mind and body and memory and emotions gives a poem its ability to work its magic; if you give to it, it will give to you, and give plenty.

—James Dickey, How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (via jarrettfuller)

I moved to Cambridge when I was in my 20s, and I was living with my ex-history professor, who was dangerous and sophisticated. And I encountered a croissant for the first time. I loved it … I never knew that you could be alone, that one could walk into a bakery and get a cup of coffee and a croissant and sit down and eat it. It struck me as the height of sophistication.

—

-Marie Howe, State Poet for New York

A Poet and Her First Croissant — SINGLE GIRL DINNER