Charming Imperfections

May 17

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

May 14

“4.
lest we would sit it down
into fractions, and facts-
certainties -
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of
knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and
loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly
through the pale-pink morning light.” Mary Oliver from “Bone”

“I wrote about a boy who grew up and got so hairy people hunted him for his fur. He had to hide in the trees, and he fell in love with a bird who thought she was a three-hundred-pound gorilla.” Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“How else will you know
the color of crushed time;
how else will you feel
what it is to change and
remember,
to lose and absorb
this summer inside you” Johnathan Galassi, from “Girlhood”

“

Its dark.
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood in a room of empty pianos.

When you return to something
you love,
its already beyond repair.
You wear it broken.

” James L. White from Lying in Sadness

“

Then there’s the girl, in the white dress,

meaning purity, or the failure

to be any colour. She has no hands, it’s true.

The scream that happened to the air

when they were taken off

surrounds her now like an aureole

of hot sand, of no sound.

Everything has bled out of her.

Only a girl like this

can know what’s happened to you.

If she were here she would

reach out her arms towards

you now, and touch you

with her absent hands

and you would feel nothing, but you would be

touched all the same.

” Margaret Atwood from Girl Without Hands

“And so with the sunshine and the great burst of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Apr 15

“On Christmas day, we sat and looked at the presents. My mother cried and threw her shoe through a window. I prayed by reading Johnathan’s British Book of Birds aloud to the heavens. It responded in a scatter of soft white tongues that told us nothing.” Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

Apr 14

“There’s no going back to childhood unless you’re somehow tethered to it and can feel the weight of it against your body like a kite pulling at you from its invisible world; then you will understand everything though feeling, and the world will be at once tender and brutal and you’ll have no way of knowing which on any given day. And you’ll love everyone deeply but learn not to trust anyone…” Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

“I didn’t want cake. I wanted my mother to forget herself and remember me. Eventually they brought the cake into the room. I ate it and cried and sat between them and repeated over and over mechanically that biting was wrong. But deep down I still loved the boy and would have bitten him again and again, forever. And he knew I loved him. And it was pure and spontaneous.” Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

“The most important notes in music are the ones that wait until sound has entered the ear before revealing their true nature. They are the spaces between the sounds that blow through the heart, knocking things over.” Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

“He thinks I suffer from depression. But I’m just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.” Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

“I firmly believe that while lies and deception destroy love, they can also build and defend it. Love requires imagination more than experience.” Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

“Bach wrote the Cello Suites for his young wife as an exercise to help her learn the cello. But inside each note is the love we are unable to express with words. I can feel her frustration and joy as my bow carves out the notes of the mild-mannered organist who saw composing as one of his daily chores. When Bach died, some of his children sold his scores to the butcher; they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany, a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.” Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

Charming Imperfections

To watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.