Other People's Words (Amy Hempel & Neil Gaiman)

I'm off in a place far far away (Turkey, Antalya, near the beach park, at an internet cafe) and have been devouring books in between my sumptious meals.

Before I can share with you my own adventures + the photos of such, here's some delectable bits of other people's stories to chew on:

[Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman]


"In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again."

"Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that witches are often betrayed by their appetites; dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you can betray them with your tongue."

"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."

"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."

"You're a poem?' I repeated.

She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.'

Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?'

What's your name?'

Enn.'

So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?"

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[The Collected Stories by Amy Hempel]

" I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief."

"I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself"