We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
n
The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls–blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked–stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).
To Andy:
Happy Birthday!
n
The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.
de saint-exupéry, The Little Prince
But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn’t have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler’s felt so that we should never hear it.
foer, Everything Is Illuminated
m
I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is:
Put your cards on the table.
m
People are by and large a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lie of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.
m
New York is the thing that seduced me.
New York is the thing that formed me.
New York is the thing that deformed me.
New York is the thing that perverted me.
New York is the thing that converted me.
And New York is the thing that I love too.
Patti Smith
n
I’ve decided your last name sounds like a fancy way that a waiter nowadays would describe salad dressing. “The tossed wild greens are finished with shaved parmesan and a light andrizzi of balsamic reduction and duck fat.” See what I mean? Andrizzi. Totally makes sense.
-m.t.
m
the mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.
m
the end of a lovely weekend /start to a lovely week.
n
ohMAAN 