J'espere...

Scarlett Johansson had my dress on. I’m hype.

abstractelements:

the row, 2013

(via thestriversrow)

Know we not the excellence of humanity if we do not expose ourselves to it. The soil beneath you eventually becomes the same old dust but go to the lands where the “dust” is red like ginger hair or colored like cognac. Go to the lands where the sunset is the prime time show of the evening. Go to the lands where the sun kisses your cheek to wake you up and lays a beautiful day out in front of you for no other reason than because it thinks you are deserving of such things. Go to the lands where the women disintegrate like cubes of raw sugar in a hot cup of tea. Go to the lands where the men don’t buy pretty girls houses but build homes for their wives. Go. Go. And go some more. I urge you to explore the world beyond the soil you’ve gotten so accustomed to. Allow yourself to learn how different the air tastes in the east. Make love to a woman whose name you cannot pronounce but find other things to do with your tongue. Make love to a man that believes you’re worth marrying on site. And pray. Pray in another land to another god under another sky for things you’ve been to shy to ask for. Leave your worries in the wind. Leave your bills by the bedside, paid of course and then take the little coins you have left and spend it on your lifetime.

-T Lloyd

teachingliteracy:

amandaonwriting:

Literary Birthday - 18 February

Happy Birthday, Toni Morrison, born 18 February 1931

13 Quotes

1. What was driving me to write was the silence - so many stories untold and unexamined.
2. There was a vacuum in the literature. I was inspired by the silence and absences.
3. If you’re blocked, you probably ought to be.
4. If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
5. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
6. I often think about rewriting or continuing the life of particular characters in subsequent books, but I have found that it’s a kind of trap because you never really go on to another topic.
7. In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
8. I didn’t plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. 
9. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. 
10. Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It’s truly unbelievable.
11. I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort. 
12. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway. 
13. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. 

Morrison is an American novelist, editor, and professor. She is best known for The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. She won the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Dope.