since feeling is first

since feeling is first

who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
e. e. cummings

Dive For Dreams By E.E. Cummings
dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at this wedding)
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for god likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)


somewhereihavenevertravelled,gladlybeyond
by ee cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands







the great advantage of being alive
the great advantage of being alive
(instead of undying) is not so much
that mind no more can disprove than prove
what heart may feel and soul may touch
--the great(my darling)happens to be
that love are in we,that love are in we
and here is a secret they never will share
for whom create is less than have
or one times one than when times where--
that we are in love,that we are in love:
with us they've nothing times nothing to do
(for love are in we am in i are in you)
this world(as timorous itsters all
to call their cowardice quite agree)
shall never discover our touch and feel
--for love are in we are in love are in we;
for you are and i am and we are(above
and under all possible worlds)in love
a billion brains may coax undeath
from fancied fact and spaceful time--
no heart can leap,no soul can breathe
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.
For love are in you am in i are in we


e. e. cummings

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love is more thicker than forget
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky







in Just-
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee








you shall above all things be glad and young

you shall above all things be glad and young.
For if you're young, whatever life you wear
it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love.
whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time
that you should ever think, may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to
dance.

may my heart always be open

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to
know
and if men should not hear them men
are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are
not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool
who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one
smile





"Francois Rabelais. He was this poet. And his last words were
'I go to seek a Great Perhaps.' That's why I'm going. So I don't
have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps."

At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but
then it's over and you're relieved.

Well, before the adventure comes the unpacking.

But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have,
swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old
and boring." Alaska

"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with
that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right
they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never
be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because
we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy,
we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.
They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing
and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts
cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."
"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive."
"So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom
bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she
was a hurricane."
"Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over
there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's
somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful."
"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your
whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll
escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining
that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use
the future to escape the present."
"Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I
go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't
have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps."
"He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had
just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us,
and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There
were so many of us who would have to live with things done
and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right,
things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see
the future. If only we could see the endless string of
consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we
cant know better until knowing better is useless. And as I
walked back to give Takumis note to the Colonel, I saw that I
would never know. I would never know her well enough to
know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if
she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me
from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my
crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart."
"When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books."
"They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love
something more interesting."
"What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is
it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have
been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and
there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic.
What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes
five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of
blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous."
"At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but
then it's over and you're relieved."
"I may die young, but at least I'll die smart."
"We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and
turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because
nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said
that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the
cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you
stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering
when they did."
"And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that
which had come together commenced to fall apart."
"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to
wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those
movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most
innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and
she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous
and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly
fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the
bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and
she was hurricane."
"I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the
flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn
down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for
want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God."
You never get me. That's the whole point."
"That didnt happen, of course. Things never happened the
way I imagined them."
"It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and
having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar
was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How
do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?"
"For she had embodied the Great Perhaps--she had proved to
me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander
maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in
perhaps."
"That is the fear: I have lost something imporatnt, and I cannot
find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses
and went to the glasses sotre and they told him that the world
had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.
"After all this time, it seems to me like straight and fast is the
only way out- but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows,
but I choose it."
"But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words
tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the
sort of people biographies get written about."
"It's the eternal struggle, Pudge. The good versus the naughty.
...
Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the
war." Pudge
That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying?
Which is he trying to escape- the world or the end of it?"
Alaska
Suffering,' she said. 'Doing wrong and having wrong things
happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about
the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of
the labyrinth of suffering?...Nothing's wrong. But there's always
suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend
who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next
to you. Suffering is universal. It'st the one thing Buddhists,
Christians, and Muslims are all worried about."
"So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost
who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but
some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know
her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible
for me. And the accident, the suicide, would never be anything
else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you to a fate you didn't
want, Alaska, or did I jsut assist in your willful self-destruction?
Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know wheter to
feel angry at myself for letting go.
But we knew what could be found out, and in finding out, she
had made us closer- the Colonel adn Takumi and me, anyway.
And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her,
but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
"I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving
someone who might have loved you back but can't due to
deadness."
"If only we could see the endless string of consequences that
result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until
knowing better is useless."
"People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the
idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the
thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even
imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people
believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to."
"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your
whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how youll
escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining
that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use
the future to escape the present."
"And then I was asleep. That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-
mouth sleep, that sleep that is not particularly restful but
difficult to wake up from all the same."

"I do not say 'good-bye.' I believe that's one of the bullshittiest
words ever invented. It's not like you're given the choice to say
'bad-bye' or 'awful-bye' or 'couldn't-care-less-about-you-bye.'
Every time you leave, it's supposed to be a good one. Well, I
don't believe in that. I believe against that."
John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
i no longer give a fuck. i mean, i didnt think i gave a fuck
before. but that was amateur not-giving-a-fuck. this is stop-at-
nothing, dont-give-a-fuck freedom.

i build a wall of silence that no goth sorrow can climb.

when things break, its not the actual breaking that prevents
them from getting back together
again. its because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining
ends couldnt fit together even if
they wanted to. the whole shape has changed.

i am going to let the close of my locker speak for me. i am
going to let the sound of my
footsteps speak for me. i am going to let the way i dont look
back speak for me.

i will admit theres a certain degree of giving a fuck that goes
into not giving a fuck. by saying
you dont care if the world falls apart, in some small way youre
saying you want it to stay
together, on your terms.

Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny.
Thats me: Im not that.

I think about how much depends upon a best friend. When you
wake up in the morning you
swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground
and you stand up. You dont
scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the
floor is there. The floor is always
there. Until its not.

Youre wondering how its scientifically possible
that youre paying oh-so-much attention to me now that I have
a boyfriend when you were
totally uninterested in me before. Sadly, science is baffled by
the mysteries of boy
psychology Jane

this is what i never allow myself to need.
and of course ive been needing it all along.

i had no doubt that tiny thought he got depressed, but
that was probably because he had nothing to compare it to.
still, what could i say? that i didnt
just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the
core of me, of every part of
me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black?
that i hated those pills so
much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?