From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
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When you come to the edge of all the light you have, and must take a step into the darkness of the unknown, believe that one of two things will happen to you: either there will be something solid for you to stand on, or, you will be taught how to fly. – Patrick Overton, from SARK’s Succulent Wild Woman
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From By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart
Was it for her, after all, for her whom I had never expected nor imagined, that there had been compounded such ruses of coincidence? Behind her he for whom I have waited so long, who has stalked so unbearably through my nightly dreams, fumbles with the tickets and the bags, and shuffles up to the event which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds.
The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely. But by the bathing pool, or on the sandhills of the beach, the Beginning lurks uncomfortably on the outskirts of the circle, like an unpopular person whom ignoring can keep away. The very silence, the very avoiding of any intimacy between us, when he, when he was only a word, was able to cause me sleepless nights and shivers of intimation, is the more dangerous.
Then she leans over in the pool and her damp dark hair falls like sorrow, like mercy, like the mourning-weeds of pity.
It is written. Nothing can escape. Floating through the waves with seaweed in my hair, or being washed up battered on the inaccesible rocks, cannot undo the event to which there were never any alternatives… For me there was no choice. There were no crossroads at all.
Oklahoma girl through-and-through. Writer, aspiring domestic goddess and totalitarian dictator. Taking on the world one carb-induced coma at a time. Co-host of Picture Shows & Petticoats. 
