Endstill

baby elephants are so CUTE

Adding more elephant facts to the compilation!

she…              longs to run herself aground in a sad secret death. Is it a god inside you, girl?

The problem of pain is that I cannot feel my father’s, and he cannot feel mine. This, I suppose, is also the essential mercy of pain.

I tell you I am happy, and you tell me you are happy, and I am told I’m supposed to hate you, since hate is the body that stays when love leaves, but by now that skin has a new name, and if the story of us begins in summer, then I’m the one who left. I’m the one who buried everything that had a face.

Did you really think she was a tender flower you could trample upon, and damage her very soul? She is wildfire. And she is coming to devour you whole.

a secret code between women: are you safe? in a contact of eyes. i’m here if you need me, the littlest shift of a skirt, of an inclined head, of watching the man who is asking you to smile, bitch. you aren’t alone on the walls of restrooms, i was where you are too. the quiet doling of emergency numbers, the shelters. the space between two women in a largely empty train station. the waiting game of two women strangers who walk, quietly and quickly, to their cars in abandoned parking lots, who watch to be sure the other leaves safely. text me you get home safe. the tally marks of drinks on hidden wrists, carefully disguised as other things ever since men picked up on what it meant and used it to target the “weakest link.” 

Some people will never fit into your life, no matter how much you want them to.

The hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. You have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

INTERVIEWER What benefits have knowledge and culture afforded you in your lifetime? ECO An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d’Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it’s an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege.

The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, ‘Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.’ For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed.