Talya Salman

“By summer I have stopped communicating with Finn. My life expands
without her in it. My head begins to clear. The sun is magnificent; it wakes
me early, and in the sun, I change. I am light and energetic. My days are
spent in my backyard reading books of nonfiction. I find solace in
devastating memoirs (miscarriages, natural disasters, death, and addiction).
When I tell people what I’m reading, people who read fiction and not
memoirs, they’re usually appalled at the storyline. How is that fun for you?
they ask. I read for hours, drinking coffee and eating toast and sweating
from the brilliant sun.”
― Chloé Caldwell, Women

“to the whore who took my poems
some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus:
12 poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I’m not Shakespeare
but sometimes simply
there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“I had never traveled alone before and I
discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had
the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste
that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

“Are you?” he asks. “Happy?”
I lift a shoulder. “I could be happier, I guess. Couldn’t we all?”
― Elissa Sussman, Funny You Should Ask