Tag: words

One afternoon, Stephen Colbert came in to the office. His show was about to premiere so he hadn’t spent much time in our studio. As he walked past me at my cubicle, he stopped and said, “You’re a new face, what’s your name?” I didn’t know what to really say, so I replied, “Oh, I’m just an intern.”

Colbert looked at me a moment and then said: “Just an intern? Hey, look, everybody starts somewhere. I was just an understudy at one point, but that’s just a point in time. It’s not about where you are now, or even where you hope to go, it’s who you are that matters. I’m Stephen, who are you?” I introduced myself and we shook hands. “Don’t let your place in the world dictate who you are to anyone. We all have the same merit.” Then he was gone, but his words lingered.

via Splitsider 

There is no neuron with our lover’s face on it. There are instead a vast number of neurons that, as a stable set of connections, represent our lover. When they are important to us, we concentrate on them, and as we do, the brain increases the neurochemical strengths of their neural connections.

Many things are unimportant to us, or become so. For these things the neurochemical linkages become weaker, and finally the thought dissipates like an abandoned spiderweb. Neurons cut unused and unimportant thoughts by weakening the neurochemical strengths of their connections. Often a vestigial connection is retained, capable of being triggered by a concentrated retracing of its path of creation, starting with the sensory neurons that anchor it.

On the “hard” problem of love – Virtually Human by Martine Rothblatt

It feels good to think about you when I’m warm in bed. I feel as if you’re curled up there beside me, fast asleep. And I think how great it would be if it were true.

Toru, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Am I a masochist?
Because the mere thought of your name makes my heart ache and my mind go insane. My legs collapse in the middle of a memory we once shared and my face is covered in tears that I can’t hold back.

But I choose to torture myself with your heartbreaking absence instead of living a life without you at all.

First Taste of Heartbreak 

I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about — with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second.

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West (via theresathingcalledlove)

Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Sylvia Plath

It’s always really frustrating to see the last line of this quoted alone.

(via mustangblood)