Writers are melancholy people.

They live in depressing apartments and eat beans. They drink and commit suicide and get committed. They write to face the demons that most people avoid. They’re sexy. Most don’t make a lot of money, don’t have very many good friends and don’t celebrate holidays because they don’t have families because they don’t know how to love or be loved or how to not be in pain. Every work is another hemorrhage.

It’s a life few are cut out for, just like how only some people look right in ripped jeans and an old CBGB shirt.

Ernest Hemingway famously said “there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” It’s the blood of others, these writers, that pumps through our veins, gives us pause and expresses in words what we didn’t know we didn’t even know we felt. And we’re left thankful, perhaps, for their darkness, and for their light.

“I’m not frightened. I’m not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.” ~ Friedrich Schiller, Love and Intrique

“Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice – it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!” ~ Johnny Cammareri, Moonstruck

“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.” ~ Henry Rollins

 

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened – then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ~ Anais Nin

“You’re beautiful, but you’re empty… One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass, since she’s the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

 

 

 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ~C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

…and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment…” ~Plato, The Symposium

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Ed: Kate Bartolotta

Moonstruck:  Fantasyland. Henry Rollins: People I admire, & miss 2. The Great Gatsby: Books, Music (and a few Movies). Anais Nin: Dylan Pattyn via YouTube. The Little Prince: This is a Child’s World <3 ( Art & Illustrations ). C.S. Lewis: People I Admire. Plato’s Symposium: albert.stmarys-ca.edu