“[The one who wants to be with you wants] to brag about you, because they know Steve Jobs could never create something as fascinating as you.”
— The One Who Wants To Be With You, Nico Lang
The City Life
I drove through the city this morning and saw it in a new light.
Traffic, filth, too many people - all week I’ve been cursing the city life. Who could possibly manage to live in a place like this? I thought to myself. Certainly not an artist.
But the city life is in my blood and I felt it beckoning to me from outside my car window.
So I parked and I walked and I noticed the old buildings covered with vines and the trees growing out of concrete and civilization hiding behind civilization and I remembered where I come from.
I grew up in a city, a city not very unlike this one. I grew up walking purposefully among tall silver buildings. I grew up clutching my belongings close to my side and gasping amid the smog.
I thought the city life was terrible and ugly, but now I remember how much I loved my banana-shaped city and how much I miss hailing taxis and smelling the aromatic fare of street vendors and the busy busy crowded culture.
And finally I feel the words in my fingertips for the first time in what feels like a very long time.
The city life is not a quiet life, but it may be an inspired life if one only allows the mind to be overcome with the great poetry of the city.
I would not mind returning to the city life, I think. I would not mind it at all.
“I walked home that day, cold because I was underdressed, thinking that what John said appealed to me: marriage as a public admission of circumstances, as correct labeling, because the future will be uncertain regardless, and organizing in preparation has to be O.K.”
— Hiding From The Truth, Ryan Crawford
“As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O! let my looks be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.”
— Shakespeare, Sonnet XXIII
“‘If the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you?’ No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via littleblips)
(via 24freedinners)
Dear cold weather: please come back to Southern California. I am not ready for clear skies and beach days yet.
“I am more interested in your fruit than I am your theology. If your knowledge doesn’t better equip you to love, it’s worthless.”
— Mattie Montgomery (via missericaleigh)
(Source: breanna-lynn, via awelltraveledwoman)
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
— Gustave Flaubert (via musingsinfemininity)
(Source: quote-book, via awelltraveledwoman)
