"Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem."

Janet Fitch, White Oleander

(via girlinlondon)

(Source: expeditionwild)

"Somewhere in his body — perhaps in the marrow of his bones — he would continue to feel her absence."

Haruki Murakami  (via expeditionwild)

"Hiding somewhere in that girl is a soul defined by pain. I don’t know what left her fragile,..But beneath her wall of bluster is uneven ground."

Ellen Hopkins, Perfect (via rawrxja)

"I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory."

Lemony Snicket, Beatrice Letters   (via expeditionwild)

"She went back to her room and put on her best dress, high heels, tried to fix up. But there was a terrible sadness about her."

Charles Bukowski (excerpt from Post Office)

"I was never more myself than when I was lying in this man’s arms. But was I ever much OF myself in them?"

Amy Hempel’s short story, “Offertory”

"Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses…"

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

We take the length of the couch, squirming like maggots in ashes.

"I meet a person, and in my mind I’m saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark."

Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel)

On Amy Hempel

It’s about the sentences. It’s about the way the sentences move in the paragraphs. It’s about rhythm. It’s about ambiguity. It’s about the way emotion, in difficult circumstances, gets captures in language…

These Hempel sentences, with their longing and their profound disquiet, do not rage or posture the way the men of the minimalist realist period did. They ache. And this ache seems to have everything to do with a rather profound and cruelly underestimated lineage of women writers in North America…

It’s the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself.

-Rick Moody

Ms. Hempel, your sentences are going to carry me through tonight.