This Isa Nice Neighborhood by Farid Matuk

"We all joined the astronaut corps and are waiting in line for the moon."

"I'm sorry you have to leave Mexico, that's how much I love you."
- Tallying Song 2.13.2008

Read it here

Bolinas Journal by Joe Brainard

"A little girl wants a quarter. Giving her a nickel she mumbles "motherfucker" and walks away."

"We were talking about life yesterday, Bill and I (yes, life) and Bill was saying how his idea of being happy was to spend the whole day in bed with someone. (Me too)."

I Remember by Joe Brainard

"I remember how much rock and roll music can hurt. It can be so free and sexy when you are not."

"I remember how disappointing going to bed with one of the most beautiful boys I have ever seen was."

"I remember those times of not knowing if you feel really happy or really sad. (Wet eyes and a high heart.)"

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

"It is not nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue."

"A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute.
No more."

"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice"

Red Wind by Raymond Chandler

"I sipped my drink. I like an effect as well as the next fellow. Her eyes ate me."

"She wasn't beautiful, she wasn't even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was."

Read it here

Steps by Frank O'Hara

"all I want is a room up there
and you in it"

"oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much"

Read it here

Equinox by Lorenzo Thomas

"If this is solace,
   These men standing
up against the wall
These are the guardians
Of future pathways –"


"Talking together as gray-haired men
   with the guy
You looked up at the stars with
When you were boys

And wondering if there's a God
   a girl, a goal
A meaning to the universe
& knowing now
   you really do not know much more
Than you did back then,"

"A boy's job
To listen to the old men's lies
And learn the music . . ."

Read it here

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

"Divorces are made in Heaven."

"More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

"They were bums and they were hungry and they didn't have talent for song-making. All they had in the world was the nerve to stand in a back yard with cap in hand and sing loudly. The sad thing was in the knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the sun is still bright, it is thin and doesn't give you warmth when it shines on you."

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered -- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure..."

"And look at me, Little Igor, the bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive in life is something you have earned."

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

"I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables. I thought about my small victories and everything I'd seen destroyed, I'd swum through mink coats on my parents' bed while they hosted downstairs, I'd lost the only person I could have spent my only life with, I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, and how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless."

"I hope you never love anything as much as I love you."

"In the end, everyone loses everyone."

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."

"Held in the palm of our half hour together were one hundred million arguments, and impossible admissions, and silences."

"I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering, they would have found us floating face-down in two thousand white pages, or buried under the salt of my evaporated tears."

"I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her."

"Years were passing through the spaces between moments."

"I heard the roar of that baby's silence."

"Can lions love?"

"How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?"

"On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice in it."

"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on ... I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you."

"It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?"

"Lovers pulled up each other's underwear, button each other's shirts, and dressed and dressed and dressed."

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

"There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find the sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing -- not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past."

"I promise to tell you how one falls in love."

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves ... We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

"Strangers kiss softly as moths, she thought."

"Only a dead name is permanent."

"Alice Gull, he could say, who once pushed her hands up against the slope of a ceiling and spoke of a grand cause, who leapt like a live puppet into his arms, who died later on a bloody pavement, ruined in his arms."

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"She did not know yet that splendour is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret."

"They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other."

"Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away -- realizing that the totality of a life may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments. His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war's ending -- in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he came the personality itself -- there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved -- so easy to be loved -- so hard to love."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired."

"It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

"Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."