Quote #2501 from On Love from Alain de Botton
Fri, 2010-03-05 08:37 — GabrielleHowever happy we may be with our partner, our love for them necessarily prevents us [unless with live in a polygamous society] from starting other romantic liaisons. But why should this constrain us if we truly loved them? Why should we feel this as a loss unless our love for them has already begun to wane? The answer perhaps lies in the uncomfortable thought that in resolving our need to love, we may not always succeed in resolving our need to long.
Quote #2488 from The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Fri, 2010-02-26 20:52 — Gabrielle"You are quick for what you are," he said, "but slow, I think, for what you were. It is said that love makes men swift and women slow. I will catch you at last if you love much more."
Quote #2468 from Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
Sat, 2010-02-20 04:03 — GabrielleThe serious part is their bodies. I sit in the hall with the cradled telephone, and what I hear is their bodies. I don't listen much to the words but to the silences, and in the silences these bodies re-create themselves, are created by me, take form. When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that. Let me have that. What power they have over me is held through the eyes, and when I'm tired of them it's an exhaustion partly physical, but also partly visual. Read more »
Quote #2461 by François de la Rochefoucauld
Wed, 2010-01-20 23:34 — Gabrielle
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
Maxim 76.
Quote #2455 from The Real Life of Sebastian Night by Vladimir Nabokov
Wed, 2010-01-20 21:58 — GabrielleI cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.
Quote #2452 from City That Does Not Sleep by Federico García Lorca
Wed, 2010-01-20 20:27 — GabriellePero no hay olvido, ni sueño:
carne viva. Los besos atan las bocas
en una maraña de venas recientes
y al que le duele su dolor le dolerá sin descanso
y al que teme la muerte la llevará sobre sus hombros.
---
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.
Quote #2441 from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers
Wed, 2009-12-30 19:38 — GabrielleFirst of all, love is a joint experience between two persons--but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world--a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring--this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. Read more »
Quote #2438 from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Wed, 2009-12-30 18:31 — GabrielleBut in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Quote #2436 from At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
Wed, 2009-12-30 18:17 — GabrielleIt was true what Jim said, this wasn't the end but the beginning. But the wars would end one day and Jim would come there then, to the island they would share. One day surely the wars would end, and Jim would come home, if only to lie broken in MacMurrough's arms, he would come to his island home. And MacMurrough would have it built for him, brick by brick, washed by the rain and the reckless sea. In the living stream they'd swim a season. For maybe it was true that no man is an island: but he believed that two very well might be.
Quote #2432 from Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Tue, 2009-12-29 09:26 — GabrielleHe wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever, sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind of hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential remoteness remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to be hopeless. He rather hated hope. "Une immense espérance a traversé la terre", he read somewhere, and his comment was:"--and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having."
If you're interested in sharing poetry, artwork, personal/recovery stories, responses to questions about self-injury, short stories, articles, essays, opinion pieces, links to your videos on Youtube, etc. then consider adding it to the site. You do not have to be a member (though to add blog posts you do). It is not strictly limited to self-injury but can also be about related mental health issues you're struggling with or have struggled with in the past (mental illness, personality disorders, abuse, etc.).