“[Martin Luther King, Jr.] concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the ‘loving your enemies’ sermon this way: ‘So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you,’I love you. I would rather die than hate you.”

Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” 


― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

❝ Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street. ❞
Frida Kahlo, to Marty McConnell (via thenocturnals)

“I love you like I love the internet. You’re amazing, but I don’t understand how the fuck you work.”

— Connor Sampson

“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.” 
― Stephen King, It

❝ To say he worshipped her is not hyperbole, but although his love was not requited he carried his sorrow without complaint, revealing it only in the slight widow’s hump that began to show across his shoulders. It was a load, always present, a pain, a pressure, and it was this which drove his engine, which kept him moving, dancing, talking, joking, as if the sheer pain would be too much if he sat down and let himself feel it. ❞
Peter Carey
❝ [as if banishing love is a fix.] as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes ❞
D. A. Powell, from “corydon and alexis, redux” (thanks, kaylenebama)
❝ i haven’t written a poem in so long
i may have forgotten how
unless writing a poem
is like riding a bike
or swimming upstream
or loving you ❞
Nikki Giovanni, from “Habits”
❝ I’m terrified what a love like this is going to cost me. ❞
Jared Singer, from “The Only Love Poem I Will Ever Admit to Having Written, Version 2”
❝ Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness. ❞
Louise Erdrich
❝ We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. ❞

Rainer Maria Rilke

❝ I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse. ❞
Henry David Thoreau
❝ Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love. ❞
Isaac Bashevis Singer
❝

When you love a band—especially when you’re young—you end up forming a weird, sacred, and irrational bond that’s entirely one-sided and exists only in your mind. Even when that love lasts for years and years, outlasting “real” friendships and romantic entanglements and living on as one of the only constants in your life outside of family (and maybe not even family), it’s still essentially a construction you’ve made up for the sake of entertainment. Bands can’t love you back; the best they can offer is an abstract, “Hello Cleveland!” kind of appreciation.

Being a fan is a more socially acceptable version for having an imaginary friend.

 ❞
Steven Hyden
❝ To understand love as something that cannot be deserved is at once a sort of terror and relief—a humbling, unsettling, ultimately freeing thing. ❞