“In his excellent book Love is an Orientation, Andrew Marin talks about how one of the persistent questions in a gay person’s life is ‘Will you leave me?’ Men and women who pursue same-sex romantic relationships are afraid their actions will cause their family and friends to abandon them, while men and women committed to remaining single are afraid that everyone around them will make no room in their lives to include them, consigning them to the lonely hell of watching happy families flourish from behind a one-way mirror… .
It is unbelievably important to be a relentless and affirming presence in the lives of gay friends and family. Often the entire weight of a terrifying future bears down on their present life, turning small social barbs into serrated spears, innocent silences into damning judgments.”
— Jordan, friend requests, gaysubtlety (via withruemyheartisladen)
by: Anna Kamieńska
translated by: Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon
Tell me what’s the difference
between hope and waiting
because my heart doesn’t know
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope
(via hours)
by: Alice Walker
from: Horses Make a Landscape Look Beautiful
I have a friend
who is turning gray,
not just her hair,
and I do not know
why this is so.
Is it a lack of vitamin E
pantothenic acid, or B-12?
Or is it from being frantic
and alone?
“How long does it take you to love someone?”
I ask her.
“A hot second,” she replies.
“And how long do you love them?”
“Oh, anywhere up to several months.”
“And how long does it take you
to get over loving them?”
“Three weeks,” she said, “tops.”
Did I mention I am also
turning gray?
It is because I adore this woman
who thinks of love
in this way.
(via hours)
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (via aseaofquotes)
“‘One never reaches home,’ she said. ‘But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.’”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian (translated by Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck) (via liquidnight)
“Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world.”
— Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (translated by Frank A. Capuzzi in collaboration with John Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell), Basic Writings (edited by David Farrell Krell)
“Clara and Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato — this cluster made up a drama without him. And he himself was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives. He searched out things, he collected things. He was an abashed man, an inheritance from his father. Born in Abashed, Ontario. What did the word mean? Something that suggested there was a terrible horizon in him beyond which he couldn’t leap. Something hollow, so when alone, when not aligned with another — whether it was Ambrose or Clara or Alice — he could hear the rattle within that suggested a space between him and community. A gap of love.”
— Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
by: Mary Oliver
from: Thirst
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled—
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
(via hours)
“Illness is a foreign land, and you go always alone.”
— Peter Hobbs, quoted in I want to be alone: the rise and rise of solo living by Eric Klinenberg, The Guardian
“[O]nce you realise you’re not obligated to persuade others about your existence, it becomes a lot easier to exist.”
— Sloane Crosley, quoted in I want to be alone: the rise and rise of solo living by Eric Klinenberg, The Guardian
