Rita > Recent Status Updates

We all accumulate. Not junk but feelings. We hold onto stuff we’d be better off letting go of. [...] A grudge. Childhood fears, a teenage crush, everything that ever hurt you. I guess I always thought that was just being human. [...] blame, guilt, things I said or didn’t say, people I was mad at or that I thought were mad at me, that didn’t love me, or that I thought didn’t love me enough, but maybe they did.

The point of art is to help you like your life better.

Music could always help me find my feelings, had stood beside me at funerals, celebrated my joys, sat patiently with my loneliness. Not just mine, every person’s. It could reach inside them to find what they needed to say or cry or yell into the ears of a hard old world.

You don’t even have to think about it, can’t learn or unlearn it; you just feel it in your body. Music is made the world over, and its makers might use different patterns and instruments, but we’re all the same in the way we’re moved by it. [...] It’s a language we’re born knowing. To be blessed with its full fluency is a treasure.

“When I’m playing, I’m not me anymore. I go inside the music and disappear in there.” [...] A feeling of having been erased from the world for a while. [...] it sounded like being drugged. [...] Not just high, bigger than that. The word I could think of, that seemed the right size, was joy. I told him he’d probably hit on the secret to why people like me kept doing it for such a lot of hours every day.

[A partita] is, a composition made of a lot of parts with different paces and moods. [...] You’ll usually have a prelude, a thrilling allemande, maybe a slow, sexy sarabande—the contrast is the point. The parts are all different, and the artist’s work is to make them all add up to a something that feels whole.

Happiness is there for the taking, and so is grief, tenderness, hope, the wonder of lakes and mountains. Reach into that bottomless music box and pull out whatever medicine your day is wanting.

I’d loved music all my life, with that burning feeling I assumed other people must have when they wanted to get married.

La storia è fatta di cicli. Cicli che ci generano, anche se non lo capiamo mentre li stiamo vivendo. Cicli di politica, cicli di sfruttamento, cicli di immigrazione, cicli di organizzazione, cicli di accumulazione, cicli di distribuzione, cicli di dolore, disperazione, speranza. L’errore, concluse Dan, sta nella convinzione di non esserci mai passati.

CHE SCHIFO

What if the spirit of Christmas is just the friends we met along the way?

It’s funny how when you love someone, truly, truly love someone, some things just don’t matter. You’re going to put up with their bad habits and quirks because you know that no matter how much they irritate you, your world is inherently better with them in it.

Leggiamoci quest'ennesimo libro leggero e spensierato, oplà

... loro e innumerevoli altri venuti prima di loro e che sarebbero indubbiamente venuti dopo, perché quel mondo che dava a intendere di desiderare la pace sembrava essere perennemente in guerra.

Aveva trascorso una buona parte della sua vita adulta a pensare che la sua esistenza fosse limitata per via della sua gamba. Perché non poteva dire di aver servito in guerra, il grande marchio di identità. Eppure […] suo padre […] Skip. Erano loro ad aver subito drastiche limitazioni...

La saggezza che viene con l’età è irritante, si rese conto Cal, perché fornisce una lucidità a posteriori ma senza i mezzi per poter cambiare qualcosa.

Quando Everett sentì la notizia del bombardamento […], la sua mente tornò alle nuvole di gas letale rilasciato per uccidere, nel 1918. […] non era guerra. Era sterminio. […] Definire quella nuova arma uno «sfruttamento dell’energia fondamentale dell’universo» era, lui lo sapeva, una vera stronzata. Era uno sfruttamento dell’arroganza umana.

Si sta praticamente trasformando in romantasy sotto i miei occhi e sto ODIANDO

La magia accetta qualunque incubo tu le offra e gli dà vita. La magia non è in grado di creare un incubo: può solo evocare qualcosa che già esiste, nella tua testa, in attesa di essere liberato.

La vita va affrontata di petto. Sia nel bene che nel male. È questo che ci rende umani.

Finally, poetry is subjective. Everybody has an opinion, and because of that, nobody’s officially right or wrong.

Second, it’s honest, and honesty is never in vogue. We are all so overly fond of the adage that the truth will set us free, but there’s a reason so many poets end up in jail. The real truth is, each of us lives in a cage, but poetry is a key. It reminds us that unless we unlock our own doors, we’re probably not going anywhere.

Poetry is problematic.
First, it’s not easy. It forces you to think and sometimes thinking hurts. Also, poetry can make you feel stupid, like you don’t get it. And if you do get it, then it’s only because it just revealed something about yourself that you were hoping to keep hidden.

There are more than two sides to every story; it’s never as simple as right or wrong, black or white. We’re all gray, Batter, every last one of us.

Awful people succeed because nice people let them. This is the drawback of being nice. Nice people worry that it isn’t nice to take action against awful people because they don’t want to act awful themselves—they don’t want to ‘stoop’ to that level. But I think nice people have been stooping all along. The worst kind of stooping—because it isn’t stooping, it’s bending over.

Plus, despite what my pre-law classes would call an appalling lack of evidence, their answers always seemed right. Or something even more unlikely. Truthful.

That’s how I used poetry. To understand the world. To decode, analyze, interpret, think. […] The poetry section […] was like that: full of short, distilled explanations of where and why people went wrong—and occasionally right. It didn’t seem to matter what the topic was—love, war, hate, jealousy, crime, retribution, revenge, or reconciliation —the poets had it covered. And they provided actual answers.

L'amore intonava il solito vecchio ritornello e lo abbelliva. Non c'era niente di nuovo. Loro due non avevano inventato niente, anche se gli sembrava di sì. L'amore era un racconto che l'altro interpretava diversamente. La storia che lei aveva vissuto le era parsa vera, ma non era la storia che aveva vissuto Francis.

Mi hai fatto male, si limitò a dire.
E tu ne hai fatto a me, ribatté immediatamente lui. Non è così che va ogni storia d'amore?

La voce nella sua testa disse: Vivere tanto a lungo nel desiderio non ti ha dato la felicità.
Ma a me sembrava felicità, ribatté lei. Almeno in certi momenti.
Però non lo era, ribadì la voce.