“There Is A Solitude In Seeing You, Followed By Your Company When You Are Gone. You Are Like Heaven’s

Katherine Larson, from Radial Symmetry; “Gardens in Tunisia”

[Text ID: “There are days that walk through me / and I cannot hold them.”]

“All you do is think. Because all you do is think, you’ve constructed two separate worlds—one inside your head and one outside. Just the fact that you tolerate this enormous dissonance—why, that’s a great intangible failure already.”

—

Natsume Sōseki, And Then

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.

“It had been the dream of his life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all his life he had struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how he assimilated it. He had striven constantly for an unostentatious style.”

— Boris Pasternak, from Dr. Zhivago (Pantheon, 1957)

embrace (II), peter wever

Taemin instagram update 210223 (@lm_____ltm)

flowery tea ♡

— Letters to Véra, Vladimir Nabokov

[text ID: Listen, my happiness—you won’t say again that I’m torturing you? How I’d like to take you off somewhere with me—you know how those highwaymen of old did: a wide-brimmed hat, a black mask, and a bell-shaped musket. I love you, I want you, I need you unbearably . . . Your eyes—which shine so wonder-struck when, with your head thrown back, you tell something funny—your eyes, your voice, lips, your shoulders—so light, sunny . . .]

a lot of things aren’t ok but everything will be