Linguistics, My Beloved.

please stop expecting me to actually go to sleep when i say “goodnight.” the moon is awake and therefore so am i

Questions To Ask People You Like:

Favourite classical authors?

Favourite poem?

Favourite book?

Preferred writing utensil?

Favourite place?

Favourite memory?

Most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?

Favourite library?

Favourite flower?

Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice?

Favourite quote?

Favourite Latin phrase?

British or American spelling?

Favorite obscure fact?

Favorite historical figure?

Favorite romance novel?

Favorite big city?

Favorite small town?

Favorite constellation?

Favorite university?

Favorite British town?

Favorite obscure author?

Favorite fabric pattern?

Favorite song?

Story of their first love?

Ideal plans for tomorrow?

Favorite old French author?

Favorite turn of phrase?

Favorite capitol or city hall?

Favorite old building?

Favorite museum?

Favorite book store?

Favorite folk tale?

Favorite historical story?

Favorite historical battle?

Oxford or Cambridge?

Edinburgh or London?

Favorite Italian town?

Favorite palace or castle?

Favorite noble family?

Favorite royal family?

Favorite century?

Ever written a love letter?

Favorite weather?

Tea or coffee?

If your name was Adelia, which nickname would you choose, Addie or Delia?

Favorite Greek, Roman, or Norse myth?

Opinion on Oxford commas?

Favorite word in a foreign language?

Favorite English word?

Favorite historical time period?

Favorite song lyric?

Favorite things?

I believe that a morning should never describe a day. Of course, I don’t believe mornings listen to mortal pleas and reasoning, but I try to enact this rule myself. Yet, it is a morning’s nature to bleed into your perception of a day, tint it with sorrow or with beauty. The only times when I forbid myself from enforcing this rule is when my day is unknowingly stricken with a morning of perfect quiescence, an awake before the world has begun to turn. Those rare mornings can feel free to pour through the seams of time and stain the parchment of afternoons and evenings a beautiful shade of rose. I’m quite a hypocrite, I do know.

To define is to limit, darling.

I never wish to be easily defined.

“Vive vitam tuam, nam morte tua morieris.”

Live your own life, for you will die your own death.

When Haruki Murakami said, "Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum - a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself." And when Audrey Hepburn said, "Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once."

the cryptography students

messy handwriting, rushed scribbles on the page

the satisfaction of untangling a particularly difficult substitution cipher

coming up with your own codes 

half-finished crossword puzzles tucked into your bag

seeing patterns everywhere you look

analyzing how information travels from person to person through the internet

the familiar weight of a calculator in your hand

a fascination with puzzles and mysteries

secrets told in hushed whispers

valuing privacy and security

reading about the history of codes and codebreaking

applying elegant, pure math to the real world

the shining rotors of an antique cipher machine

a chessboard, frozen in the middle of an unfinished game

the elegance of a well-constructed cipher, easy to encode but difficult to break

passing encoded notes back and forth with your friends

a stack of thriller novels on your bookshelf

watching old spy movies, laughing at the inaccuracies

a powerful sense of determination, refusing to give up

understanding the importance of cryptography in the internet age

Quotes from famous writers (on the process of creating)

1. "You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it." - Octavia E. Butler

2. "Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." - William Faulkner

3. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." - Toni Morrison

4. "I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." - Shannon Hale

5. "Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer." - Barbara Kingsolver

6. "It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly." - C. J. Cherryh

7. "Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head." - Mike Rich

8. "If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write." - Somerset Maugham

9. "If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it." - Wally Lamb

11. "You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write." - Annie Proulx

12. "As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand." - Ernest Hemingway

13. ''One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.'' - Lawrence Block

14. ''Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.'' - Ray Bradbury

15. ''This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.'' - Neil Gaiman

16. ''Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.'' - William Faulkner

17. ''You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don’t know everything about it. You can’t.'' - Anne Rice

18. ''There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.'' - W. Somerset Maugham

19. ''I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.'' - Tom Clancy

20. ''People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.'' - R.L. Stine

21. ''Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.'' - Barbara Kingsolver

22. ''No person who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.'' - CS Lewis

because you were only 5 when you learnt the dark was something you should be afraid of and that night, a child found god in the bathroom light

when you turned 11, someone said you were too loud, too brash, too annoying for a girl; they made you think you’d never make it in this world

then came your 13th birthday when you realised that your mother would only love the person you could become for her, so you made yourself smaller and smaller until you ceased to exist outside of your own mind, screaming “are you happy now, mother?” but no voice comes out because you can’t be too loud, remember?

at 15, you hated yourself for not being able to fight without crying (you still do) so you don’t let anyone in that can hurt you

and now that you’re 17, you’ve waited for summer long enough to know it will never arrive for a person who says so little of what she means.

// you’ve been 8, on your way to 18, and barely survived the years in between