"To be sure, my solution is not the ideal. But when you don’t like your own life, when you know that you must change lives, you don’t have any choice, do you? What can one do to become another? Impossible. One would have to cease being anyone, forget oneself for someone else, at least once"
— Albert Camus, The Fall, 106
"I’m praying that you’ll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it. Don’t worry about the structure, I know to compress and re-arrange the plot a bit to give a perfectly acceptable movie-type structure: making it into one all-inclusive trip instead of the several voyages coast-to-coast in the book, one vast round trip from New York to Denver to Frisco to Mexico to New Orleans to New York again. I visualize the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak. I wanted you to play the part because Dean (as you know) is no dopey hotrodder but a real intelligent (in fact Jesuit) Irishman. You play Dean and I’ll play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I’ll show you how Dean acts in real life."
— Beginning of letter by Kerouac to Marlon Brando (via fuckyeahbeatgeneration)
(Source: The Huffington Post, via fuckyeahbeatgeneration)
"If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."
— John Steinbeck (via rulesformyunbornson)
winter by john burnside
Imagine i loved you still and nights like these were visitations,
An endless pentecost of lips and hands
And bodies resurrected in their beds,
Not mine, or yours, but given, like a snowfall.
Out in the dark, the woods are from a map
That someone has left unfinished: hand-coloured signs
For birch, or deer, and nothing to explain
The new red of a kill, or how the silence
Wells around a fallen sycamore;
But here, where we lie down in differing weather,
The night fades on our skins while we are dreaming,
And winter is the self, day after day,
Ghosting a life from the nothing it knows by heart.
"It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known."
— Carson McCullers (via psychotherapy)
