Witch Work By Neil Gaiman.

Literature Asks

Quotes from literature to inspire you when writing!

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” - J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”

“The curves of your lips rewrite history.” - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.” - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I took a photo of us mid-embrace. When I am old and alone, I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful.” - Joe Dunthorne, Submarine

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” - W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Who, being loved, is poor?” - Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” - Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.” - Alfred Tennyson

“I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.” - Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“I don’t want you to miss all the things that someone else can give you.” -  Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“You can love someone so much… But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.” - John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” -  Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Just… isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?” - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“I’m just so thankful for our little infinity.” - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I hope, or I could not live.” - H.G. Wells

“I hadn’t expected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.” - Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

“Your eyes are full of language.” - Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters 

“You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture.” -  Junot Dìaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone.” - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea: A Novel

“I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.” - Ian McEwan, Atonement

“You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.” - Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.” - Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.” E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.” - Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” -  Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.” -  P.D. James, The Children of Men

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.” - Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong 

“Above, the starts shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe” - Stephen King

“The mouth is made for communication, and nothing is more articulate than a kiss.” - Jarod Kintz, It Occurred to Me

“If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it” - Nicole Krause, The History of Love

“I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world…” - Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke With You

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“our teeth and ambitions are bared” is a zeugma

and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND

Happy International Women’s Day!

“The women we honor today teach us three very important lessons. One, that as women, we must stand up for ourselves. The second, as women, we must stand up for each other. And finally, as women, we must stand up for justice for all.” ― Michelle Obama

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

PLEASE REPLY OR STATE IN THE REBLOG IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN BUYING

I’ll sell this for about 7-8 USD, though, price might vary when the final product comes out, cheaper or so. Also, I’ll ship this world-wide!

There will be 

Original Version (as in the pic)

Spades Queen Version

Bunny Version

Black Top Hat Version

2P Version

Mochi Version

And still open for more suggestions

Thank you, please boost ♡

You guys just have to trust me on this one and click here okay?

reblog and make a wish! this was removed from tumbrl due to “violating one or more of Tumblr’s Community Guidelines”, but since my wish came true the first time, I’m putting it back. :)

DO NOT QUESTION MY COLLECTION OF JANE AUSTEN SNAKE PHOTOS

A MAN IS ALLOWED TO HAVE A HOBBY

So.

As you might imagine, my inboxes have been flooded over the last few days.  My fic represents, for a lot of people, either their start in Avengers fandom, or the safe place they retreat to when the angst and infighting and shipwars got too intense.  Which I get, and I appreciate, and I’m so glad if my old fics can give people a little happiness, even after all this time.

But there’s a thread I keep picking up in comments, that kind of worries me.

That things that happened in the MCU have taken the fandom away from them.  That the way things happened in Endgame have left people distraught, or angry, or just grieving.  And a lot of people have worried that they’ve ‘lost’ these characters.

And look.

Look.

I say this as a fandom old.  I say this as someone who reads comics.  Who came from the Trek fandom.  Who’s lived through bad movie adaptations and subpar ghostwriters and writing staff changes that have destroyed tv shows before they had a chance to really fly.

Don’t let canon take anything away from you.

You can be disappointed in a thing.  You can have your heart broken by a writer.  You can hope against hope that something that means the world to you will be ‘true,’ but don’t let a corporation take your heroes away from you.

Every one of us has to pick and choose what we keep and what we leave behind.  But every single version of Captain America has been fanfiction since Jack Kirby and Joe Simon put their pens down.  He’s owned by a corporation, and they can decide what’s on screen, who gets paid to write him, who gets the big platform.  They get to decide canon.

But canon is meaningless.

Canon is a way to win an argument in a bar or in a schoolyard.  It’s knowing publication dates and issue numbers and who wrote what arc and when the reboots happened.  It exists.

But when I think of Hawkeye, canon is only part of the picture.  I do think of Matt Fraction’s run on the comics.  I do think of those early years, sneaking my brother’s issues of West Coast Avengers.  I think of the weird, wild, off beat run of Secret Avengers.  But I also think of @dr-kara’s art of him.  I think of fanfic long since deleted, that introduced me to the fandom tropes of Clint living in the vents.  I think of the Tumblr posts, diving deep into the psychology of trauma, into his place as the most human and the most pointless of the original six, into a thousand stupid memes.  Caw-caw, motherfucker.  I think of the comments I got, telling me he was OOC.  I think of the Hawkeye cosplayers I’ve met, including the one guy who was in full gear at Star Wars Celebration in Florida.  I asked him why, and he shrugged and said, ‘Clint would’ve.’  I agree with him.  

I think of the first time a friend put a bow in my hands, and showed me how to shoot, wobbly and uneven, at a straw target all the way across the yard.

I think of the bruises that dotted my arms afterwards.

So canon can add new things.  Take bits away.  Make me think.  Make me hurt.

But nothing canon does will ever cause him to be different, not on any fundamental level.  Clint Barton started forming in my head when I was eight years old.  He belongs to Marvel, but the version I carry with me has a lot more sources than that.

Guys, this is a long way of saying: find your own version of the character.  Find what you need in a fandom.  And think of canon like that one fic that has a million kudos on AO3 and you just. Don’t.  Know.  Why.  That one fic, that everyone talks about, that you just can’t stand.

If canon doesn’t work for you, then discard it.  And move on.

But don’t let a corporation take a character you love away from you.

Don’t ever let that happen.

Some Basic Friendship Skills

Dos

1. Talk about things that interest others, and not just things that interest you.

2. Share the conversation. Don’t talk over others, interrupt others, or seek to be the centre of attention.

3. Be interested in what other people have to say. Ask open questions, and try to find out more.

4. Notice when people do well, and make the effort to praise them for it. Try to be an affirming, and encouraging, friend.

5. Be respectful, considerate and polite. Be sensitive to the feelings of others.

6. Think before you speak. (Sometimes it’s better to say nothing than to speak your mind and upset or offend).

7. Learn how to ask for what you want and need in a non-threatening, and non-defensive way. Don’t react; and don’t pick needless arguments.

8. Try to understand the perspective of others – and don’t just assume that you are right and they are wrong.

9. Look out for others – and be a trusted friend

10. Back off, don’t dominate, and give your friends some space.

Don’ts

1. Don’t brag about what you’ve done or what you’ve got.

2. Don’t put others down.

3. Don’t judge and stereotype people.

4. Don’t take over the conversation. Let others tell their jokes, and have their say.

5. Don’t try to control other people, or to make them do what you want them to do.

6. Don’t talk, or gossip, about others.

7. Don’t make jokes at others’ expense.

8. Don’t demand perfection – allow your friends to be human, and to sometimes make mistakes.

9. Don’t be sensitive and quick to take offense.

10. Don’t be mean or stab others in the back.