“They Said That It Takes One To Know One. The Reason I Can Point Out A Person’s Evil Nature Is Because

I am terrified all the time

I am filled with fear in the face of beautiful things

The most beautiful thing I ever saw has made me the most afraid

And the fear has never left me

— Niina Pollari, from “Megalophobia,” Path of Totality

"What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.”

— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories.

why do all the words sound heavier in my native language?

—  @metamorphesque, Yoojin Grace Wuertz (Mother Tongue), Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky (by Garth Greenwell), Jhumpa Lahiri (Translating Myself and Others), @lifeinpoetry

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗        

~ Beautiful Magnolias swaying in a fountain

Stephanie Garber, Once Upon a Broken Heart

i needed to read this

have been fundamentally changed as a person (<- read a good book)

When Oscar Wilde said Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation, and Jorge Luis Borges said I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.