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I don’t think there’s anything sadder than when two people are meant to be together and something intervenes.
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The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
— William Saroyen (via glorifythehour) -
It is funny how you do not miss affection until it is given, but once it is, it can never be enough; you would drown in it if possible.
— Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing (via larmoyante) -
A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.
— Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last (via larmoyante) -
To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.
— Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (via queen-of-the-coast) -
VI. He never broke my heart. He only turned it into a compass that always points me back to him.
— Clementine von Radics, In Defense of Loving Him (after Megan Falley)(Source: notafuckinglady)
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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (via larmoyante) -
In Super Mario World, if you jump onto one of the moving platforms in Forest Secret Area and then quickly jump back onto solid ground, the background will be moving even though you’re standing still.
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(via teenagerposts)
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Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.
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(Source: la-transition, via silent-butterflies)
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(via forever90s)
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I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
— Franz Kafka (via greatauthorquotes) -
Ask Gayle is a weekly column in which New York Times bestselling author Gayle Forman answers fan questions about love, life, and everything in between! Submit a question anonymously via our Ask box. Today we have two questions, and an answer that tackles them both!
How did you deal with your first break up?
Badly.
Tears. Sleepless nights. Phone calls. Letters slipped into lockers: What went wrong? Why wont you talk to me anymore? A feeling of helplessness. Anger. Sadness.
Oh, I should mention, this was seventh grade. And the breakup was with a girl friend. My first and worst breakups have always been with friends. But the feelings were much the same when I was dumped, six years later, by a Dutch boy. (Yes, a Dutch boy. Just One Day’s Willem is my revenge.) I’d stand outside the bar where he worked, usually after spending a bit too much time drinking in said bar (it was Amsterdam, I was legal), trying, unsuccessfully, to get him to tell me why.
The reason I tell you both stories is twofold: Heartbreak can happen in any which way, often well outside the parameters of romance, and it can hurt no matter how it’s perpetrated. And the ensuing feelings—helplessness, betrayal, humiliation, anger, sadness—are just the same.
I’m an emotional person. I never handed the breakups well. Whether I was dumped by a guy or a friend, I always wanted to know why. To process. I wrote letters. Or poetry. I ambushed people to demand explanations. Now that I am Older and Wiser, I understand the futility of this. Just because I wanted an explanation, didn’t mean I’d get one. And sometimes the very thing I thought was helping—forcefully asking why—only made it worse, only made me feel more helpless.
When it comes to a breakup, or any relationship, you can’t change the other person. You can’t make them love you or like you or understand you or take you back. You can’t make them see you for the rad person you are. You can’t make them feel guilty or not feel guilty. You can’t make them give you the explanation you so desperately feel you need if they don’t want to, or more likely, they don’t even know it. You can’t control any of that.
All you can control is you. You control the person you are, the side of yourself you show (we all have better or worse angels). And you also control how you react to other people. You control that. And that is huge.
You get to decide to be a person who’s not going to be treated poorly and leave a relationship that doesn’t pass that muster. You get to decide to be a person who, when dumped, instead of tailspinning into an emotional freakout, moves on, processes those feelings of heartbreak and betrayal by writing poetry or kicking ass in track or doing whatever it is you do for satisfaction. Sometimes you might feel like freaking out, but you get to decide not to give in to those feelings. (Fake it till you make it is one of my favorite bits of advice. It’s wound up in several of my books, for reason. It works!)
The worst part of a breakup, if you’re the one dumped, is the feeling of helplessness, powerlessness. Someone took away the decision from you. There’s no denying that. But by seizing control of how you react to it, by making a conscience decision to be the driver of your own emotional bus, you take that power back. I’m not saying the breakup won’t hurt. They always hurt. But it’s a different kind of pain. One you have the power to handle.
Want to submit a question to Ask Gayle? Drop your question anonymously in our Ask box! Check out previous Ask Gayle columns here.
Find out more about Gayle on her website, follow her on Twitter and Tumblr, and become a fan of Just One Day and Just One Year on Facebook, where you can read a 13-chapter sample of JUST ONE DAY and see daily photos from Gayle’s travels around the world!
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She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (via larmoyante)
