white oleander

i frequently find myself underlining quotes in books that i find exceptionally interesting. i don't know what appeals to me, but i can't help but write them down and reflect upon them.

**Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest--where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

**Loss. That's what was in there. Grief, sorrow, wordless and unfathomable...How vast was a human beings capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care?

**"Do you ever regret what you've done?" The expression in her eyes was as bitter as a nightshade. "You ask me about regret? Let me tell you about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.



So, I guess I just find things that I want desperately to relate to, or things I do relate to. I feel like I hoard the past. I can't seem to let it go for the life of me. There are so many things I don't wish I did differently, but I want to go back and analyze it more when the time was there for it. Now, looking back, it's only retrospect. And that tends to leave so much room. Too much room. And so at the end of the day I feel like it's easier not to wonder if what I did was in my best interest. Because, after all, I am here right now. What could I have done to then to make myself differently now? Who is to say that I would be a different person had I made different choices?