but do you hold your loved ones?

her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.

I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,

but I want to go on from here with you

fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.”

Kaveh Akbar, from Calling a Wolf a Wolf; "Soot"

(transcription below cut)

Dear John,

I don’t know why I have to tell you this today (but I do) — perhaps it’s because when I look out into the fog all I can see is the hairs of your adorable chest. I’m terribly in love with you, and have been for such a long time, ever since the first time Frank took me to your apartment. I looked around at your beautiful paintings and suddenly everything I’d ever felt about you turned into a diamond or a rose or something — anyway I went striding up and down while Frank played Poulenc and felt exactly like the Ugly Duckling the day he found he was a swan.

Then you came home and I didn’t think I could ever look at you or to you again, all I could do was giggle and snort and twitch. But I’ve looked at you a lot since then, and there isn’t anybody else in the world I want to look at; or want, for that matter.

It seems to me that I’ve been so GOOD that I couldn’t hate myself more. I don’t see why I couldn’t have been born a robber baron type instead of a fool.

Now I’m going down and set 57th Street on fire to keep you warm.

This is all nonsense. I love being in love with you, it makes even unhappiness seem no bigger than a pin, even at the times when I wish so violently that I could give my heart to science and be rid of it.

With all my love, Jimmy

— Raymond Carver, from “The Windows of the Summer Vacation Houses”

“The story is not all mine, not told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.”

— Ursula K. LeGuin, from The Left Hand of Darkness

“It has a story, but I am in it. So are you. And to realise this is a moment of some sadness. When we are denied a story, a light goes off.”

— Anne Carson, from “The Anthropology of Water”

“I find value in thinking in stories. Aren’t we all woven through with stories? Isn’t that how we think of our lives, how we survive them?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch, from “Woven”

“I told my version—faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind. And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”

— Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“My friends tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to us, […] These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe.”

— Margaret Atwood, from “Marrying the Hangman”

“You want to keep retelling my story. But it’s my story. It’s not yours. You can’t just make things up because you’d like it better if I had been braver, […] It happened to me, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s the only thing that ever happened to me. I own it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente, from “Red Girl”

“I can’t give you facts I can’t distill my history into this or that home truth and go plunging ahead composing miniature versions of the cosmos to fill the slots in your question and answer […] everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories”