She stared at the faded tile floor before her feet, but knew his every step around her small kitchen. When Martin touched the coffee cup patterned curtains he must assume she’d made, her fingers throbbed. When his eyes slid across the flowery aluminum water bottle at the table, her throat cracked with thirst.The radio clicked off.The silence of the room soaked up her raspy breaths, her pounding heart, her ache, and stirred them around the one man she ever longed for in a way that changes how you taste the world.Her desire swirled in a pulsing, betraying, blurry hook, and encouraged him to move closer.Martin obeyed.

From Chloe's Secret--coming soon“What are you saying?”“I’m saying I want to have a relationship with you. I want to love you.”“Is there a ‘but’ coming next?”“But the funny thing is, when I didn’t want to love you—it happened anyway.”He slipped his arms into my back pockets and hugged the breath out of me. I choked, my eyes stung. “I don’t know what to say.”He smiled. “Say whatever you want to. Just because I said it, you don’t have to.”He was right; I didn’t have to. He wasn’t asking anything of me.

You'll have to learn to forgive," he said. "For if you don't, you know what will happen?""What, Doctor?" I croaked, for my outburst had exhausted me."It will destroy you," he said as he handed me the tea.A tear came into my eye when he said it for I knew it was true and I would have loved to be able to do it (not because of its destroying me but because it was right, and deep down I knew that) but I couldn't and the more I thought of it the more the blood came coursing to my head so that whenever I'd write I'd find myself clutching the pencil so tight I broke the lead how many times I don't know, hundreds.

He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively re-polishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler's precision.But it was not good enough.He wanted the pages to sing with ideas that had once seemed so important to him, all and everything he knew, and yet they did not, and no amount of diligence was able to bring them to life. The story came to be a burden and weighed more heavily in his hands each time he lifted it out of the drawer. After a few weeks he was reluctant to open the desk at all.("Talking In The Dark")

I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn’t anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops… Every goddamned restaurant I go to, it’s always the same way… They’ll have some old bag on the payroll — I figure they keep her locked up in the mop closet until they see me coming. And they’ll doll her up in the dirtiest goddamned apron they can find and smear that crappy red polish all over her fingernails, and everything about her is smeary and sloppy and smelly. And she’s the dame that always waits on me.

But that which is called a Flower by any other name would still be as trusting and they were not to change her. In fact, she grew only more Hothouse-gorgeous as the bitterness poured down and off and around her and flooded the town, fertilizing crops, drowning fields, providing new homes for water birds and their babies, and bringing people from villages all around to swim in their beautiful blue lakes and marvel in the wonders of a village no longer called Numbskull but instead 'Miroslava' which means 'peace and glory.'"Numbskull's Flower and the Well-Meaning Poets Society." First published in State of Imagination

Questo folle uomo mi sta facendo tornare la gioia di vivere, quella gioia che avevo perso alla vista del corpo di mia madre privo di vita e che era stata sostituita, col tempo, da semplice gioia. Esiste una profonda, ma ineffabile, differenza tra la gioia e la gioia di vivere e sono pochi coloro i quali riescono a coglierla. La gioia è solo un aspetto esteriore, quasi un accessorio posto sul nostro corpo, mentre la Gioia di vivere, quella con la G maiuscola, è un modo di essere, una parte dell’essenza dell’individuo. È un qualcosa che si sente dentro." cit. Silvia Devitofrancesco, "Lo specchio del tempo

I came to the party with the sole purpose of getting completely shit-faced, to be perfectly honest. That was it, that was The Plan from the very beginning. I wanted more than anything that ever regrettable, forgetting-everything-you-learned-as-a-toddler kind of wasted that only either the completely stupid venture into or the complete novice (given how naive I was I think I fall more into the latter category). It was a very simple plan, but I like to think the simplest ones tend to be the most effective. The Plan sure as hell didn't involve everything else that happened that night, as all of that occurred quite naturally on its own.

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse from dustbins, paper, old tins and slippers and leaves from the tree above. Then one day, people forgot about it. They found a new dumping place and the old rubbish heap settled low on the ground. Time passed and its contents became warm and rich and fertile and people living in the area would take away potfuls of it to plant flowers in.Somehow, a rose cutting, slim as a cheeping chicken’s leg and almost brown, appeared on the rubbish heap one day.

Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.

Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.

Mungkin seharusnya aku menulis buku motivasi saja, mengutip ucapan para tokoh besar dunia dan meramunya dengan sedikit kisah perjuanganku menggapai mimpi. Pasar pembaca seperti itu tampaknya lebih luas—ada terlalu banyak orang yang sebentar-sebentar harus disuapi dengan petuah-petuah untuk memulai hari mereka. Mereka akan dengan rakus membeli dan melahap setiap buku-bukuku. Kelaparan mereka akan mengisi penuh pundi-pundiku. Akan tetapi tanganku terasa kaku setiap aku hendak memulai. Bagaimana aku bisa menulis dan menjadi inspirasi buat banyak orang bila aku sendiri merasa hidupku membosankan—dan hidup dalam rasa frustrasi berkepanjangan?

So. If this was some normal fictional young-adult book, this is the part of the story where after the film, the entire high school would rise to their feet and applaud, and Earl and I would find True Acceptance and begin to Truly Believe in Ourselves and Rachel would somehow miraculously make a recovery, or maybe she would die but we would Always Have Her to Thank for Making Us Discover Our Inner Talent, and Madison would become my girlfriend and I would get to nuzzle her boobs like an affectionate panda cub whenever I wanted.That is why fiction sucks. None of that happened. Instead, pretty much everything happened that I was afraid of, except worse.

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words.