“The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It’s useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.”
— Leonard Cohen in a 1985 interview
““And that’s what adulthood is: you wake from the nightmare and realize there’s no bigger bed to climb into.””
— John Mayer (via naturaekos)
“longing is a room built entirely of knives”
— Leslie Harrison, from “[Sirens],” The Book of Endings
“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
— John Berger (via mrsclarkkent)
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (via artpropelled)
Fran Lebowitz, “Pretend It’s a City”
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
“It’s not the pain I’m afraid of; I know about the pain. What I’m afraid of is the end of this small, sweet dream.”
— Stephen King
