What is the moment of death? The hook, the line or the sinker? When I fell in love with him? When I trusted him? When he betrayed me? What kind of death is it?

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

I can’t go back into the past and change it. but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be.

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries 

The story of my day, the story of my life, the story of how we met, pof what happened before we met. And every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries 

We are what we know. We know what we are. We reflect our reality. Our reality reflects us. What would happen if the image smashed the glass?

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries. 

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Billy Collins, On Turning Ten

Explore the reasons that compels you to write; test whether it stretches its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if the opportunity to write were withheld from you. Above all else, ask yourself at your most silent hour of night: must I write?

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I strip myself emotionally when I confess need—that I would be lost without you, that I am not necessarily the independent person I have tried to appear, but am a far less admirable weakling with little clue of life’s course or meaning. When I cry and tell you things I trust you will keep for yourself, that you would destroy me if others were to learn of them, when I give up the game of gazing seductively at parties and admit it’s you care about, I am stripping myself of a carefully sculpted illusion of invulnerability. I become as defenceless and trusting as the person in the circus trick, strapped to a board in which another is throwing knives to within inches of my skin, knives I have myself freely given. I allow you to see me humiliated, unsure of myself, vacillating, drained of self-confidence, hating myself and hence unable to convince you (should I need to) to do otherwise. I am weak when I have shown you my panicked face at three in the morning, anxious before existence, free of the blustering, optimistic philosophies I had proclaimed over dinner. I learn to accept the enormous risk that though I am not the confident pin-up of everyday life, though you have at hand an exhaustive catalogue of my fears and phobias, you may nevertheless love me.

Alain de Botton, The Romantic Movement

i want to cut these strings away, there can be no more of it. i realize how much i crave for company but when i am around people,i desire more of myself. perhaps i have forgotten how being happy feels like so i am settling in this shell. after all, there can be no real happiness, since i will be stripped naked of it in the end.

so write me off, this page of yours. i just want need contentment. i don’t need anyone else, for now at least, i’m too much for myself. 

I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belong to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

Though each love is experienced as unique and though the subject rejects the notion of repeating it elsewhere later on, he sometimes discovers in himself a kind of diffusion of amorous desire, he then realizes he is doomed to wander until he dies, from love to love.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

A space I would like to exclusively call mine, yet, ironically, most littered with words of established writers, my own mediocre book reviews, my self-filtered 'intellectual' thoughts and the occasional random streaks of writing.