#YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

francisforever2014 · 2 years

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good bones by maggie smith saturday . give it up for good bones by maggie smith saturday

#screaming and ripping my hair out THIS PLACE COULD BE BEAUTIFUL RIGHT #YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL #still need this tattooed on my body genuinely.. i should just do it #w

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funnyao3 · 8 months

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Then Jesper looked sharply at Inej. “Wait, you just…. acquired a spare body?”

“Please,” Kaz said. “The body boats run every night in the warehouse district, and the bodymen are not well paid.”

“Right, thank you for that terrifying information,” Jesper said.

#source:#You could make this place beautiful #BrighteyedJill #ao3 #funny ao3 #ao3 out of context #wesper #six of crows #soc #kaz brekker #jesper fahey #wylan van eck #nina zenik #matthias helvar #inej ghafa #soc ao3

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ao3screenshotss · 26 days

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#title:#you could make this place beautiful #author:#parsnipit #ao3 #ao3 funny #heaven official's blessing #hua cheng #xie lian

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bookquotesforthesoul · 8 months

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I was ashamed to think of how I'd leashed my joy and tugged hard every time it tried to run.

-Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

#non-fiction #memoir #you could make this place beautiful #Maggie Smith #book quote #divorce

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theadmiringbog · 8 months

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We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

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I did what many people do when they fall in love with someone who seems to have different dreams from their own: I waited him out.

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John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” It’s a poem about imperfection, about being more together than we can be on our own:

“Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean / into a strength. Two fallings become firm.”

Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

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Every day for nine months, I expected blood. From the very beginning, I expected the end. That sort of thing changes you.

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Inside current me, the me who has two children, is the me who dreamed two others. The me who lived in fear, then grief, then fear, then grief again, then fear.

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It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

—Joan Didion

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How will my children feel if they think that being seen as a mother wasn’t enough for me? What will they think of me, knowing I wanted a full life—a life with them and a life in words, too?

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I could quote my friend Jen, who says the work she does makes her husband’s life possible.

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For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. —Maggie Nelson

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who tries to save their marriage by making their partner choose between being who they are, doing what they do, and being married? I would have chosen being married, and I would have been miserable. And then it would have ended anyway.

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My trigger is stress, so my treatment is perspective.

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“Well, you can’t control anyone else’s behavior, so what can you do to manage your expectations?”

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“Do you remember what he did for you on your fortieth birthday? He made a list of forty things he loved about you. Handwritten.

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the poet Stanley Plumly said to me about poems: “They begin in the middle and they end in the middle, only later.”

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It’s late but everything comes next.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

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Then I know that there is room in me for a second huge and timeless life.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

#books #You Could Make This Place Beautiful #best of

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maryannmackey · 9 months

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One afternoon while the kids were at school, I was cleaning the house, listening to an episode of Nora McInerny's podcast, Terrible, Thanks for Asking. Her guest, Eve Rodsky, told a story about being on a trip with several close friends when everyone's husbands were calling or texting. Where were the snacks? Did they need a birthday present for the party? What time was soccer? Instead of staying overnight on that trip as planned, many of her friends went home, because it was easier to do the work themselves- finding the snacks, getting the gift, managing soccer- than to walk their husbands through doing it, or to deal with the anxious calls or snarky texts.

She came back from her trip and started to make a spreadsheet of all the tasks that were her responsibility in her marriage - all the things on her plate, big and small. It ended up growing into a massive spreadsheet, which she emailed to her husband as a way of opening up a conversation about the division of labor in their home.

I can't do that. It's too late to do anything about the inequity in my now-kaput marriage. But I made a list of tasks anyway. I wanted to see in black and white what I'd been doing in the marriage. Reader, I was going to show you the list, but I decided against it. You don't need the list.

Looking at it, I thought, No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own. I saw something I'm still trying to process: My life looked surprisingly like my mother's. My mother didn't go to college, married at twenty, and had me at twenty-four. I went to college and graduate school, published my first book and got married at twenty-eight (at which age she already had three children), and had my children in my thirties. Still, still, my life looked a lot like hers.

-You Could Make This Place Beautiful (A Memoir)- Maggie Smith

#Books of 2023 #Book Fifteen #You Could Make This Place Beautiful #Maggie Smith #Loved this one #Love when poets write books

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authorstalker · 1 year

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My March & April Reads

Winter Stroll, Elin Hilderbrand - I needed an easy, interesting read for a weekend with family, and this was perfect! My mom is also reading this series and we have fun talking about it together. Thank you, Queen Elin.

Aging with Grace: What the Nun Study Teaches Us About Leading Longer, Healthier, and More Meaningful Lives, David Snowdon - One of the many things I have in common with my pal Kerry is our fascination with nuns, so when I heard this book mentioned on a podcast, I put it on hold immediately. The title makes it sound like a self-improvement guide, but it's actually about Snowdon's findings after studying nearly 700 elderly nuns and their experiences with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Now I'm making it sound like a bummer, but it's actually a fascinating, often uplifting read! I highly recommend it.

Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano - Warning: unless sobbing in front of strangers is your kink, do not finish reading this book in public. Recommended for fans of Little Women, basketball, and family stories.

Games and Rituals, Katherine Heiny - Katherine Heiny's writing is simply the best. Every story made me feel more human, made me crack up and tear up, put me back in touch with all of my past selves. This collection is a treat—get a copy for yourself, your sister, your mom, your best pal, the coworker you're trying to impress. All hits, no skips!

One Two Three, Laurie Frankel - A gift from my sister, thank you Cara! The story is told from the perspective of three sisters living in a small town that was destroyed by the local chemical plant; nearly everyone has cancer(s), birth defects, or dead parents. The most unbelievable detail is that the town was redesigned to be accessible for all of its wheelchair users—I wish we lived in that kind of country! I read this book shortly after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and......the government should pay for all of the residents to relocate and they should also cover their medical bills.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith - Her ex is trash and this book rules. Good for her!