Someone shared these writings with me and I absolutely love them. These are two things that make up part of me! The writings are amazing. Love the girls with hearts to read and write! I will let the words speak for themselves. So here they are:
Be A Girl Who Reads
Monica Bird
Be a girl who reads. Be the girl who finds enjoyment in the written word, delights at the thoughts she finds, marvels in the plots and characters.
Read often, and read everything. Have an endless curiosity about the world and those who live in it. Discover new cultures and places; expand your mind beyond your own country and your own life.
Find new authors and new books every day. Compile an ever-growing list of printed materials to read. Browse the stacks of bookstores and libraries; get lost in their mighty labyrinths.
Embrace the popular and the obscure; realize that you need not be confined by genres or labels. Whether they are biography, memoir, fiction, non-fiction …all have a place upon the bookshelf of your mind.
Keep childhood favorites sacred. Never forget the moment you received your first library card, your first book of your own. Remember fondly reading events at school and how excited you were that books were given out for free. Recall how grateful you were, for your favorite book was already worn, pages dirtied, and cover torn by your constant reading.
Recall your first trip to the library, when you wondered how many books you could read in a lifetime and felt utterly certain that the library contained a multitude of treasures.
Bring a book with you wherever you go. Embrace purses and bags, not for their feminine qualities, but because they enable you to carry more books and keep them hidden. Less fights with your parents about bringing books to family reunions, easier to sneak books into classes; become known as ‘the girl with a book’.
Be passionate about books, the ones you love and the ones you don’t. Have opinions. Find other readers and discuss. Share your experiences and thoughts about why thisbook. Defend banned and controversial books. Understand that people have the right to decide what to read for themselves.
Realize that everyone has their own tastes, their own reading preferences. Suggest books freely but do not be upset when turned down. Remember that we approach books when we are ready for them. The stories are patient. They will wait for us.
Attempt the classics; succeed and fail. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis will be incredible, Les Miserables will be daunting, and Edith Wharton will enrage you. Move on, find other authors. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett are happy to have you in their readership.
Read the popular titles. Fall in love with Harry Potter, restrain yourself from throwing Twilight . Remember Ranganathan, ‘every reader his or her book’ and ‘for every book its reader’. There are endless possibilities. You’ll find the ones you love.
Be a reader, and be yourself. Don’t waste time on books you don’t enjoy. Don’t convince yourself that there are books you must love. Remember, always, this very simple rule:
When in doubt, ask a librarian.
You should date an illiterate girl.
Charles Warnke
Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.
Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.
Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.
Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.
Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.
Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.
Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.
Date A Girl Who Reads
Rosemarie Urquico
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.
Date a Girl Who Writes
Effie Sapuridis
Date a girl who writes. Date a girl who admires the calligraphy of Ancient China more than the latest fall line. She has ink smudges on her fingers, sometimes on her cheeks. Date a girl who comes with a list of unfinished poems, underdeveloped characters, incomplete plot lines, who has been writing since she could read.
Find a girl who writes. Look for the girl with frazzled hair and a pen behind her ear. She’s the one who spends hours deciding which new notebook to buy, only to cave and buy three, the one who rarely makes a grammatical error. If you were to search her bag, you’d find scraps of paper with incomprehensible notes and pens whose lives have ended a long time ago. That’s the writer.
The girl who writes can be seen anywhere, if you look for her. The girl who writes is always looking at you, and anyone else. She knows inspiration can be found in everything. She’s the girl you’ll find on a park bench, pen behind her ear, another in her hand, jotting down things with great, great concentration, just because coffee shops are loud. She will however be carrying coffee in a travel mug. If you looked inside the mug, you’d notice the coffee was finished – the girl who writes needs caffeine like water. Bum a cigarette off her. Notice her eyes give you a full appraisal before she hands you a cigarette. She’s profiling you.
Say something.
Don’t ever start by asking to see her writing.
Tell her something you’re sure she never knew before. A random fact, even. This will grab her attention. This will make her think, ‘what kind of plot twist is the stranger offering to the protagonist?’ When she brings up e.e. Cummings and Plath, don’t act like you know who they are if you don’t. She will test you. Ask her about them. Ask her about her favorites. Ask her if she’d like to go see a movie with you.
Always surprise her.
In reality, it’s not that difficult to date a girl who writes. Accept that she will not show you anything she’s written until she’s ready. Understand that sometimes her stories aren’t developing the way she wants and she will be angry, bitter. Be patient, be jealous of her love for worlds you can’t even begin to enter. Buy her new books, new pens, new notebooks. Surround her with words. Dedicate songs to her. Leave little notes in her lunch bag. Words, for the writer, are more intimate and personal than a sensual touch. She hears their whispers, feels them, embraces them.
If one day, you walk into the house, and she’s in a foul mood. There are pages scattered everywhere. She’s watching TV, which she never does. Don’t ask. The words got the best of her. They put up a wall and as much as she pleaded, as much as she paced, drank coffee, took a bath, went for a walk, pace some more, as much as she played with synonyms and antonyms, made comparisons, expanded the plotline then brought it back to where it was, she could not get through the block. Don’t bother comforting her. Buy paint and a canvas, let her attack it. Carry her to the bed and let her attack you. The girl who writes does not need soothing and comfort, she needs an outlet to rid herself of the overbearing emotions that are sadness or anger. Before she can write again.
The girl who writes knows exactly when a break is needed in a story. The girl who writes expects a climax. But the girl who writes is also almost never in control of her story. The characters dictate to her what they would like to do next. The story is as thrilling for her, the writer, as it is for her close sister, the reader. She relishes in these surprises, in these sharp turns, in these unforgiving assesments. She dreams of the day when her story, her life story, will be as classic as Poe or as tormented as Brite. This day that she waits for, this will be the day her story will begin.
On the day when she timidly, a deep blush rising on her cheeks, extends a bundle of loose sheets of paper, some old, some new, towards you, you’ll know you’ve successfully captured the heart of the girl who writes. Read everything she has given you, unless she stops you. Recognize, and tell her, about the beauty of her words, the conviction of her prose, the pain behind her poetry. Don’t look at her with pity when she hands you a poem about a broken heart – following it, you’ll read one about you and how maybe her heart was not so broken after all. In any case, the girl who writes does not accept pity. She is the amazon goddess of the writing world. She is the soldier, the fighter, the good guy. She is stronger than a house of bricks and her writing keeps her demons in place, holding them down and releasing her.
Date a girl who writes because she will change your world. She will bring color into your grays. When you propose, she will have known for months that it was coming. She could read your body language from miles away. She will say the simplest phrase you have ever heard her say – yes, I do – and then she will begin to carefully craft the story of your lives. Through ups and downs and births and deaths, through funny family moments and trips to unknown places (in search of new inspiration), through misadventures and inky cheeks, through everything, anything, and all that is not yet written, the girl who writes will be the doe-eyed, love-struck narrator of the story and you, her forever after knight in shining armor.
