Optimisticynic

I can online window shop for hours. I frequently think my father is the funniest person I know. I will go out of my way to avoid small talk. I love fruit flavored gum and the words "bamboozled" & "curmudgeon". I hate cinnamon flavored anything and curmudgeonly people. I've never met a sale I didn't like.

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George R.R. Martin on writing women 

• George Stroumboulopoulos: There's one thing that's interesting about your books. I noticed that you write women really well and really different. Where does that come from?
• George R.R. Martin: You know, I've always considered women to be people.

JK Rowling to write book for adults! 

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."  -

Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (via bookmania

)

"

I tried to rent the movie
about the protest,
but the store didn’t have it.

In the film, the underdog wins.
That’s how you know
it’s a movie.

They are passing a law here
to keep people from sitting
on the sidewalk. Poverty

is still a crime in America
and I am looking more and more
criminal, by which I mean

broke, by which
I mean beautiful.
Holy. Revolution

is not pretty,
but it can be
beautiful, I’m told.

The protest was dull.
There was no tear gas
and there were no riot cops.

Nothing got broken
and nothing got gassed
and nothing got smashed.

There was no blood
and the world was not saved
so we went to the movies.

In the film,
people kissed
at the end.

The underdog won.
That’s how we knew
it was a movie,

a pretty lie.
Revolution
is not pretty

but I don’t care
about looks.
Set the dumpster

on fire. Break
the windows.
Don’t kiss me

like they do
in the movies.
Kiss me

like they do
on the emergency
broadcast news.

"  - sexy balaclava by daphne gottlieb (via naomicreys)

"She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite."  -

Dave Eggers, How the Water Feels to the Fishes (via aneclecticmess)

So true. 

"I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder."  - Zelda Fitzgerald, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (via debonairs)

"And that’s where the whole trouble is. We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’t even understand our own selves."  - Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (via bookmania)

2011 Retrospective: Books! 

In 2011, I read 28 books and 8 graphic novels. Not as many as I would’ve liked, but a fair amount I think. Here’s my year end rundown. 

Read More

"Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own"  - Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."  -

Neil Gaiman (via light-essence)

Happy 2012 guys. :)

betterbooktitles:

Katherine Paterson: Bridge to Terabithia

Reader Submission: Title and Redesign by Damian Gordon.

I Married You 

by Linda Pastan

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your 
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons 
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity—
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.

*******
I love the way this poem takes the common convention of marrying for the wrong reasons and turns it around. We may not know everything about someone when we first meet them, kiss them, date them or even marry them — and that’s ok. Because can you imagine how boring would the rest of our lives be if we did?

The Books They Gave Me: Capote. 

thebookstheygaveme:

Nessa and I bonded during our junior year of high school over books (we couldn’t keep our noses out of them) and shared dislike of our boring rest-stop of a town (a dozen gas stations and fast food joints split in two by a rushing freeway). Every day on the bus we’d talk about the books we…