oh just shut up about it.

But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

Currently reading…

(via theboywhoneverwas-deactivated20)

Even today, with all we’ve built that will outlast us, we will not leave behind that secret that binds us … and no future civilization will know our secret—the secret of our existence together—just as we will not know the secrets that lived and died with the past.

Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

currently reading and knocking. me. out.

(Source: mavirtute)

It’s like, what do you mean relationships aren’t like in the movies? It makes me feel very stupid, so I sort of think of writing as a way of figuring out the truth for yourself. If you’re writing something and it obviously strikes you as false, you can’t write it. And so by writing, you discover what seems true to you. What seems real. It’s a way of thinking through things. I feel like the question of how should a person be, it was a question I took on and emphasized it and really wanted to work to the end of it.

Dogfish

I wanted
The past to go away, I wanted
To leave it, like another country; I wanted
My life to close, and open
Like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
Where it falls
Down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
Whoever I was, I was

Alive
For a little while.

…mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
Or mean,
For a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
Swim through the fires to stay in
This world.

(Source: observando)