We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction… 

                                       —  “all about love: New Visions” by bell hooks

when richard siken said "he was pointing at the moon but i was looking at his hand" i had no choice but to go crazy with longing

“My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is exactly how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend.”

— Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), from “Beneficence”
in “Vladimir Nabokov. The Complete Short Stories” (via sapphoisms)

i literally can’t stop thinking abt that richard siken quote where he falls to the floor crying but all he can focus on is the details of the wall in front of him

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realise you didn’t paint it very well.”

“…to eat a fruit is to know its meaning.”

— Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe

Characters in Russian literature are always eating (or offering) fruit at significant moments. (Gurov in The Lady and the Lapdog eats a slice of watermelon after he and Anna have slept together for the first time; Oblonsky in Anna Karenina is bringing Dolly a large pear when she confronts him with his infidelity.) It is in the blood of Russian storytelling to take note of the fruit.

— Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills

“All speech is a request or demand for something missing, as lacking in some respect. Ultimately, as Lacan puts it, all speech constitutes a demand for love. Whenever we speak, we are unconditionally asking to be heard, we are asking for our request to be recognized, we are asking to be responded to, we are asking to be loved.”

— Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, Bruce Fink
(via ecrituria)

“Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manet, verba volat—which has come to mean, in our time, “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air”—used to express the exact opposite; it was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared to the silent word on the page, which is motionless, dead. Faced with a written text, the reader had a duty to lend voice to the silent letter, the scripta, and to allow them to become, in the delicate biblical distinction, verba, spoken words—spirit. The primordial languages of the Bible—Aramaic and Hebrew—do not differentiate between the act of reading and the act of speaking; they name both with the same word.”

— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading