I'm not a writer, I won't be a writer, I don't know why I continually try to be a writer. I hate to be told how to write. You cannot teach this. Why do I keep trying to learn? You cannot learn this. I'm not a writer. I won't be a writer.

I'm too stubborn to write. I'm too self-indulgent to invent characters that aren't me, too ignorant to invent stories that aren't mine. If I'm a writer I'm a selfish, absent-minded memoir writer, and I cannot write anything else. I'm not a god damn writer.

I am in love with your spleen

Sometimes I wonder if God is just another name for gravity. Or  gravity is the scientific name for God. It is what holds us at the exact distance from the Sun necessary to sustain life. Science is mathematical abbreviations for the Old Testament. The Big Bang is Genesis. Science and religion are constantly colliding. Gravity is laughing at us, scoffing at our ignorance. Fate is the magnetic force within each of us, God is the force that draws you to me, your atoms to my atoms. What you call my smile is the reaction of my protons and neutrons, hunny I am in love with your nucleus, with the sequence of your cells, your molecules. God is what makes matter, matter.

I want to meet this man

White wine and an orchid in the window that seems content to die. I thought of ways to kill my baby. I wanted to strangle my stomach with a rope. Throw myself from the window. Roll in shards of glass. I want to be on a roof with the city below me, with something below me, because right now I am below everything. I want to be in Alaska with ice under my feet, with a cigarette between my teeth, because right now I feel everything.

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated