i would kill for the confidence of novelists who write genius-poet characters and then actually write samples of the “genius” poetry in the book. if i were a novelist writing a genius-poet i’d just be like “trust me, the poetry’s real good.”
…as long as there were still cedar trees and dogs, I reckoned I had a reason to keep going.
• A movie you’ve already seen
Confessions of a Shopaholic - ★★★★★
“You know that thing when you see someone cute and he smiles and your heart kind of goes like warm butter sliding down hot toast? Well that’s what it’s like when I see a store. Only it’s better.” Rebecca Bloomwood
“Cost and Worth are very different things.” - Luke
Brandon Taylor, Real Life
Emily Dickinson, from a letter to C. H. Clark (May 1, 1883)
Sweet, tiny Prim who cried when I cried before she even knew the reason, who brushed our mother's hair before we left for school, who still polished my father's shaving mirror each night because he'd hated the layer of coal dust that settled on everything in the Seam.
Willow Shields as Primrose Everdeen | The Hunger Games (2012)
darlingdarrows
Arrayed at the top of the steps of the New Forum are the 140 Senators of the Republic. Ten per Color, all draped in white togas that flutter in the breeze. They peer down at me like a row of haughty pigeons on a wire. Red and Gold, mortal enemies in the Senate, bookend the row to either side. Dancer is missing. But I have eyes only for the lonely bird of prey that stands at the center of all the silly, vain, power-hungry little pigeons.
Her golden hair is bound tight behind her head. Her tunic is pure white, without the ribbons of their Color the others wear. And in her hand, she carries the Dawn Scepter—now a multi-hued gold baton half a meter long, with the pyramid of the Society recast into the fourteen-pointed star of the Republic at its tip. Her face is elegant and distant. A small nose, piercing eyes behind thick eyelashes, and a mischievous cat’s smile growing on her face. The Sovereign of our Republic. Here at the summit of the stairs, her eyes shed the weight from my shoulders, the fear from my heart that I would never see her again. Through war and space and this damnable parade, I have traveled to find her again, my life, my love, my home.
I bend to my knee and look up into the eyes of the mother of my child.
“’Lo, wife,” I say with a smile.
“’Lo, husband. Welcome home.”
You know I do think that a lot of people need to get more comfortable reading nonfiction to understand Things & Ideas. I see a lot of people especially online expecting to be educated on current issues or on political ideologies or what have you ~through fiction~ and while that often works for like. the gist of the idea. you do kind of need to read nonfiction to understand most things past their most simplistic form
For instance a work of fiction can tell you "homophobia is bad" but do you want to understand why homophobia is bad? why it exists? how it manifests? what a microagression is? how to combat it? that's the territory of nonfiction, you shouldn't expect fiction to tell you that. and furthermore refusing to engage with nonfiction and instead assuming fiction will tell you need to know on an issue is going to result in a warped perception of the issue that's going to be completely unproductive for everyone involved
As a note, nonfiction is not the "unfun reading" where fiction is the "fun reading" and you have to go into the nonfiction mines to do your reading labor or whatever. Nonfiction is often fun to read. It's fun to learn! You have to move away from the idea that nonfiction is "homework books". There are tons of nonfiction books where you'll have a great time.
For the prey to live the predator must sometimes die.
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (2022) dir. Olivia Newmon
Did I Deserve to Exist? No, and so on.