Banana Love Quotes

If love had feathers and tasted like dog food, then I suggest you wear shoes with your banana pudding. (This statement also defines my political beliefs).

Love is the kind of thing that's already happening by the time you notice it, that's how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn't change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types -- love where there's an end in sight and love where there isn't.

When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely. Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.

I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.

I would like to pause the story a moment to talk about ‘nothing will change’. I’ve heard it said to me repeatedly by women I love during my twenties when they move in with boyfriends, get engaged, move abroad, get married, get pregnant. ‘Nothing will change.’ It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity and the intimacy of our friendship will change for ever.

Her eyes were those of someone who's just fallen in love, someone who sees nothing but her lover, someone who has no fear of anything. The eyes of someone who believes that every dream will come true, that reality will move if you just give it a push.

Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.

Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.

This is what it means to be loved... when someone wants to touch you, to be tender...

Nobody peels a banana before stabbing themselves with it. But that’s exactly how I love—dangerously. 


I was happy. I loved the night, I loved t so much it almost hurt. In the night everything seemed possible. I wasn't sleepy at all.

You should see what she’s wearing, Callie. It’s velvet. Canary yellow velvet. Turban to match. She looks like a furry banana.

Pumpkin?” He nodded at the cookies. “Of course.” “Anna Banana, I love you.

I love feeling the rhythm of other people's lives. It's like traveling.

You have the nicest window, you know? None of the others can even compete. It´s not flashy like the others, or bleary – your window gives of this nice, quiet light.

May the memory of this moment, here, the glowing impression of the two of us facing each other in this warm, bright place drinking lovely hot tea, help save him, even a little bit.

Eighteen luscuios scrumpitous flavors, Chocolate,Lime and Cherry Coffee,Pumpkin, Fudge-Banana, Caramel Cream and boysenberry. Rocky Road and Toasted Almond, Butterscotch,Vanilla Dip, Butter Brinkle, Apple Ripple,Coconut,and Mocha Chip, Brandy Peach and Lemon Custard. Each scoop lovely.smooth and round. Tallest cream cone in town lying there on the ground.

There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity.

Life is a performance, I thought. Perthaps the word "illusion" would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me "performance" seemed closed to the truth. Standing there in the midst of the crowd that evening, I felt this realization swirl dizzily through my body in a dazzling splendor of light, if only for an instant. Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.

If someone could give me some sort of evidence that what we're doing is really love, I'd be so tremendously relieved...

I felt sure of this. However much I loved him, and as beautiful as the world was, none of it was powerful enough to take the weight off his heart, that heaviness that dragged him down, into the beyond, making him yearn to be at peace.

No, I just wanted to recapture the incredibly vivid love we'd had at first- the love I'd shared with the tall man standing next to me, with the man I adored.

Può darsi che in futuro stando con me conoscerai dolori, guai, problemi ma, se vuoi, costruiamo insieme una vita complicata, ma più felice di qualsiasi vita solitaria

There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.

I got up and sprinted into the ocean, chasing my father. I'm in love with the moment when the water switches from being so cold you want to leap up into the air to something that feels just right against your skin.

Your love is different from mine. What I mean is, when you close your eyes, for that moment, the center of the universe comes to reside within you. And you become a small figure within that vastness, which spreads without limit behind you, and continues to expand at tremendous speed, to engulf all of my past, even before I was born, and every word I've ever written, and each view I've seen, and all the constellations, and the darkness of outer space that surrounds the small blue ball that is earth. Then, when you open your eyes, all that disappears. I anticipate the next time you are troubled and must close your eyes again. The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe. Oddly, at that moment, she looked over at me and smiled. As if in response to what I'd been thinking, she said, "That was beautiful. I'll never forget it.

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.

… I was thinking, listlessly, is this what it means to be happy? But now I feel it in my gut. Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated – defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Still, to cease living is unacceptable.

It was the truth. I felt a yearning love for every instant that passed.

Love is a banana. First you peel it, and then you roll on the condom.


I see two lovers looking over the edge of the cauldron of hell. Are they contemplating a double suicide? This means their love will end in hell.' I couldn't stop laughing.

Perhaps there are people in this world who love their fountain pens with every fiber of their being—and that's very sad. If you're not in love with him, you can understand him.

The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.

We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Still, to cease living is unacceptable.

When my grandmother died, time died, too, in this apartment.

With Lizard, I felt overwhelmed by the desire to touch her skin, to kiss her, hold her, make love to her,no matter how it happened, I just had to have her, Lizard and no one else. Right then and there. Tears came to my eyes, I wanted her so much.

Actually, time had always been passing. I had just managed to avoid thinking about it very much. It would be hard for me to recapture that feeling—life wasn’t so easy anymore. Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world of overwhelming sensations; it was like I had just fallen out of love.

We've done so much together, wherever I go and whatever I see, I think of you. Newborn babies; the pattern on the plate that you can see under a paper-thin slice of sashimi; fireworks in August. The moon hidden behind the clouds over the ocean at night. When I'm sitting down someplace, inadvertently stepping on someone's toes, and have to apologize. And when someone picks up something I've dropped, and I thank him. When I see an elderly man tottering along,and wonder how much longer he has to live. Dogs and cats peeking out from alleyways. A beautiful view from a tall building. The warm blast of air you feel when you go down into a subway station. The phone ringing in the middle of the night. Even when I have crushes on other men, I always see you in the curve of their eyebrows." "Yet I must remain calm, detached. It's a little like trying to ignore a plate of delicious food when you're really hungry. When it beckons you, there's no problem with enjoying the aroma and appreciating it with your eyes, but at some point you have to separate yourself and realize, like a professional waiter does, that it's not your own. It's my job to ignore those plates heaped with delicious morsels and just carry them where they need to go.

We couldn't bear to be apart. So if Kizuki had lived, I'm sure we would have been together, loving each other, and gradually growing unhappy." Unhappy? Why's that?" With her fingers, Naoko combed her hair back several times. She had taken her barrette off, which made the hair fall over her face when she dropped her head forward. Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it," she said, raising her eyes to mine. "The pain of growing up. We didn't pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I'm here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we'd just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we'd go to sleep in each other's arms. But that kind of thing doesn't last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside world. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn't work, of course." I nodded. I wouldn't want you to think that we were using you, though. Kizuki really loved you. It just so happened that our connection with you was our first connection with anyone else. And it still is. Kizuki may be dead, but you are still my only link with the outside world. And just as Kizuki loved you, I love you. We never meant to hurt you, but we probably did; we probably ended up making a deep wound in your heart. It never occurred to us that anything like that might happen.

Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves, Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene: the lush, dark canopies of the gnarled trees, the long river, sliding smooth and white. I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills. My backpack, breathing moonlight, sags with poems. Look, and love everyone. Whoever sees this landscape is stunned.

Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.

These women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by loving parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing. Dressed in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. I think that's great. I wouldn't mind that kind of life. Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing.

I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me - obsessive, feminine love.

Love is love. It doesn't matter what kind it is.

We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me.

Wow," said Samirah as we approached the dock. "You're right, Alex. That ship is really yellow." I sighed. "Not you, too." Alex grinned. "I vote we name it the Big Banana. All in favour?" "Don't you dare," I said. "I love it," Mallory said, throwing Alex a mooring line. Keen and Gunderson had emerged from belowdecks in an apparent truce, though both sported fresh black eyes. "It's decided, then!" bellowed Halfborn. "The good ship Mikillgulr!" T.J. scratched his head. "There's an Old Norse term for big banana?" "Well, not exactly," Halfborn admitted. "The Vikings never sailed far enough south to discover bananas. But Mikillgulr means big yellow. That's close enough!" I looked skyward with a silent prayer: Frey, god of summer, Dad, thanks for the boat. But could I suggest that forest green is also a great summery colour, and please stop embarrassing me in front of my friends? Amen.

If someone could give me some sort of evidence that what we're doing here is really love, I'd be so tremendously relieved that I'd probably kneel down at that person's feet. And if it isn't love, if it's eventually going to end, I want to go on sleeping like this; I want to stop hearing the phone when he calls. Let me be alone again.

An eternity of chocolate fountains and perfect love and guys who always call when they say they will and banana sundaes that actually help you burn calories.

Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can't believe you'll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman's energies.

It’s so great, I thought, having tea in the afternoon with someone you really feel at home with.

When you love someone, you want to know. Even about the things that are hard for them.

When I write, I hold nothing back. I write like he’ll never read it. Because he never will. Every secret thought, every careful observation, everything I’ve saved up inside me, I put it all in the letter. When I’m done, I seal it, I address it, and then I put it in my teal hatbox. They’re not love letters in the strictest sense of the word. My letters are for when I don’t want to be in love anymore. They’re for good-bye. Because after I write my letter, I’m no longer consumed by my all-consuming love. I can eat my cereal and not wonder if he likes bananas over his Cheerios too; I can sing along to love songs and not be singing them to him. If love is like a possession, maybe my letters are like my exorcisms. My letters set me free. Or at least they’re supposed to.

This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us. It's not cheap. It's free, and as such will always be a banana peel for the Orthodox foot and a fairy tale for the grown-up sensibility. Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. Grace is enough. He is enough. Jesus is enough. John, the disciple Jesus loved, ended his first letter with this line: "Children, be on your guard against false gods." In other words, steer clear of any God you can comprehend. Abba will's love cannot be comprehended. I'll say it again: Abba's love cannot be comprehended.

Fuckface. A face that likes to do sex? Doosh nozl? Shit biscuit? Duck butter? Bananas. Like “crazy”? If I had to pick a fruit that is crazy, I’d pick pomegranates, with their juicy beads hiding in impossible recovecos, from which it takes an hour to free them. If that’s not bananas, I don’t know what

I’d always believed I didn’t take up a lot of space in this world—that it hardly mattered whether I was here or not. When a person left, the people around them got used to their absence. That was true enough. But when I pictured the world without me, and the people I loved living on in it, I couldn’t help but feel like crying.

You’re a natural, my love,” Charlie said. “Where did you learn how to do that? Did you practice on a banana or something?

There was a candor about him I noticed in people whose parents had given them something unconditional and absolute growing up.

I saw a straight road leading from me to him. He seemed to glow with white light. That was the effect he had on me.

Things are just things, they can't bring back the dead.It just makes me feel better. - Hiiragi

I’ll wait until then—I won't forget you. I don’t want things to end like this, only having known you during this strange time. But right now, I just can’t think about the future.

From the moment we met, I was a butterfly that flew into that space that was his soul, a room where the light had begun to dim.

Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can’t believe you’ll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman’s energies.

May the memory of this moment, here, the glowing impression of the two of us facing each other in this warm, bright place, drinking lovely hot tea, help save him, even a little bit.

So will your father object to me? Because I'm not American? I mean, not fully American? He's not one of those mad, patriotic nuts,is he?" "No.He'll love you,because you make me happy.He's not always so bad." St. Clair raises his dark eyebrows. "I know! But I said not always. He still is the majority of the time.It's just...he means well. He thought he was doing good,sending me here." "And was it? Good?" "Look at you,fishing for compliments." "I wouldn't object to a compliment." I play with a strand of his hair. "I like how you pronounce 'banana.' Ba-nah-na. And sometimes you trill your r's. I love that." "Brilliant," he whispers in my ear. "Because I've spent loads of time practicing." My room is dark,and Etienne wraps his arms back around me.We listen to the opera singer in a peaceful silence.I'm surprised by how much I'll miss France. Atlanta was home for almost eighteen years,and though I've only know Paris for the last nine months,it's changed me.I have a new city to learn next year,but I'm not scared. Because I was right.For the two of us, home isn't a place.It's a person. And we're finally home.

You already made your point,” I say with a mouthful of fruit. “Did I?” “Oh, for the love of dick, yes. Now leave me alone.” “Never. If you want, I’ll fuck you now.” The gall. I wouldn’t fuck him now if my clit was on fire and needed to be doused with nub-saving cum. I roll my eyes at him. “No thanks, we have a lifetime of fucking ahead of us,” I say mockingly. He shrugs and starts to walk away as if it makes no difference to him one way or the other. He’s such a jackass sometimes. Before I can stop myself I throw my half-eaten banana at him and it hits him on the back of his neck. He spins around, wipes his neck and looks down at the banana on the floor. “Did you really just fruitally assault me?” He thinks he’s so damned funny with his wordplay.

The only thing I’d understand right from the very beginning was that our love was supported by loneliness. That neither one of us could haul ourselves up out of the deadly numbness we felt when we lay together, so silent, in darkness so isolating it seemed to shine. This was the edge of night.

They knew that Jamaica produced sugar, rum and bananas, that Nigeria produced cocoa, and that British Guiana had large natural resources; but these names, though as familiar as the products with which they were associated, were of places far away, and no one seemed really interested in knowing anything about the peoples who lived there or their struggles towards political and economic betterment.

You don't force him, don't beat him, don't give him orders, because you know that 'soft' is stronger than 'hard', Water stronger than rocks, love stronger than force. Very good, I praise you. But aren't you mistaken in thinking that you wouldn't force him, wouldn't punish him? Don't you shackle him with your love? Don't you make him feel inferior every day, and don't you make it even harder on him with your kindness and patience? Don't you force him, the arrogant and pampered boy, to live in a hut with two old banana-eaters, to whom even rice is a delicacy, whose thoughts can't be his, whose hearts are old and quiet and beats in a different pace than his? Isn't forced, isn't he punished by all this?

Even if this night we were spending together and everything else was just going to disappear into the past, that was all right - and it seemed to me that I held this alrightness preciously in my hands, and that it was glittering there.

Nothing will change.” It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.

Es extraño, princesa, contigo me gustaría ir a caminar por el Sambil o a caernos a latas en un cine; me gustaría llevarte a ver las nutrias del Parque del Este o a comernos un banana split en la 4D. Contigo, más que tirar, me gustaría hacer el amor.

It occurred to me then, mouth full of chocolate chip banana mush, that our past is not the truth. It’s warped by time and emotion, inevitably muddied by love and resentment, joy and shame, hope and regret. I couldn’t trust my own memories. Good or bad.

He still loved her, loved her more for her wrinkles because they could not defeat his need for her. Or his love. His young lust had turned to love and then his love had aged back into lust. It was a circle. It was a miracle. It was the alchemy of flesh. They ate only what they caught from the sea - wahoo, barracuda, and mahi mahi, and they ate what they picked from the trees - papaya, banana, and coconut. Don't forget cerveza from the bodega. They did not run, they walked. They needed nothing but themselves. This was them: They were.

No matter how dreamlike a love I have found myself in, no matter how delightfully drunk I have been, in my heart I was always aware that my family consisted of only one other person. The space that cannot be filled, no matter how cheerfully a child and an old person are living together—the deathly silence that, panting in a corner of the room, pushes its way in like a shudder. I felt it very early, although no one told me about it.

I’m Scorpio. My favorite color is navy. I like apples but I don’t like bananas—except in milkshakes or baking. I love roasted red peppers.” “What are you doing?” She laughed at the random change in topic.  “Telling you ten things about myself so you won’t feel like you’re sleeping with a stranger.

I became part of the air that surrounded Sui, and breathed her incomprehensible sadness. I think that part of those feelings live within my soul. Burdened by bad karma, and a soul that beckoned such unfortunate fate, Sui used all the resources she had to make her way through love. I witnessed that.

I whispered, "Do you have a rubber?" He laughed, hushed, a laughing whisper, as though his parents were in the next room, and reached one arm past my head to a nightstand there. "A rubber chicken." He shook the dancing chicken in the air. "Will that do?" I laughed back, ran a finger along the bumps of the fake chicken skin. "Ribbed and beaked for her pleasure, even. Want me to leave you two alone?" He threw the chicken on the floor and bit my neck and I giggled and he said, "Never," and he was everywhere then. The couch was a sinking place and I disappeared into the orgy of costumes, the smell of nervous strangers, makeup and smoke, my naked body buried in the perfume of human need. I took the rubber chicken home. Plucky was my mascot, the souvenir of our date. Later, much later, there was the conception of our child. And now the miscarriage, unexpected, though I should've expected it because, why not? -- family slid through my fingers the same as the old silicone banana-peel trick. After the D&C, after the suctioning away of our tiny fetus, I drew the black heart on Plucky's rubber breast in the place where a chicken might have a heart, over the ridges of implied feathers. Indelible ink. Now she'd been nabbed by a kid too young to know what love means, what a chicken might mean. Too young to know that a rubber chicken can carry all of love in one indelible ink heart.

And these crazy maniacs? They’ll be your family too if you let them. I mean, they’ll fucking drive you bananas sometimes, but trust me when I say it’s totally worth it.” I believe him. “I can’t wait to meet them,” I say softly. His mouth travels along the edge of my jaw before hovering over my lips. “They’re going to love you.” He kisses me, slow and sweet. “I love you.” I rub the pad of my thumb over his bottom lip. “Loved you every summer since I was thirteen years old. Love you even more now.

is her favorite color, even after I told her purple-orange isn’t a thing. She ties her left shoe the loop, swoop, and pull way, and the right with bunny ears. Pen opens her bananas from the end, and she eats her eggs with boysenberry syrup. The girl who wakes up and appears in her window every morning at six-thirty sharp, with insane bedhead, only uses cola-scented lip balm and loves grunge music. She has her mom cut the crusts off her sandwiches, sides first and then the top and bottom. Pen uses the same pink plastic thermos every day at school, even though the cup is cracked. She doesn’t blink an eye as fruit punch drips from the bottom, always staining her shirt.

MINION LANGUAGE English minions hello! bello goodbye! poopaye thankyou! tank yu I'm hungry me want banana ugly bananonina I swear... underwear fire! bee do bee do bee do we love you tulaliloo ti amo I hate you tatata bala tu for you para tu toy baboi chair chasy what poka apple bable ice cream gelato butt butt one hana two dul three sae

hope I never love someone so much that they could hurt me the way Langston was hurt, so wounded all he could do was cry and mope around the house and ask me to make him peanut butter and banana sandwiches with the crusts cut off, then play Boggle with him, which of course I always did, because I usually do whatever Langston wants me to do.

As I bite into the banana bread, I realize if all around me is the evidence of what happens without my asking, doesn’t that mean that there’s possibility for more? A more trusting love where I could let myself ask for things, let myself be vulnerable and imperfect and even dispensable? A more magnanimous, forgiving kind of love where sometimes people give me what I ask for and sometimes they don’t and it’s okay? Where it’s okay to be disappointed and it’s okay to be disappointing—where we can love each other and ourselves regardless?

Love is like a banana, and I keep it in my pocket on cold days to warm up my hand.

Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman’s body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth. Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? Cucumbers and bananas and bottles, a string of pearls, a Magic Marker, a fist. Once a guy wanted to wedge a Walkie-Talkie inside of me. I declined.

That's because you think about everything in words ... You can go around and around the same question all you like, and never find an answer. I know that's how you cope, how you get through time, so I've never thought it was immature, or unhelpful. But there's another way of doing it: to sit with an empty space, and just look at it, without thinking anything, just enduring. Some people can do that.

In no time, I'd beaten cream cheese and butter and confectioners' sugar and more vanilla with my electric hand mixer till the icing was real light and fluffy, and when the cakes were cooled a little, I handed Billy Po a serrated knife, showed him how to level the tops, and we both tasted the rich leftover pieces of cake. "Boy, that's delicious," he exclaimed as he nibbled real slow and his eyes got big. "Know what I love?" I said. "All those different textures. The smooth bananas, the stringy pineapple, and crunchy pecans. Nothing like it.

When someone’s been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit. That’s why you can’t save it all up like that. Because by the time you finally see each other, you’re catching up only on the big things, because it’s too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life. Like a month ago when Daddy slipped on a banana peel, a literal banana peel that Kitty had dropped on the kitchen floor. Kitty and I laughed for ages. I should have e-mailed Margot about it right away; I should have taken a picture of the banana peel. Now everything feels like you had to be there and oh never mind, I guess it’s not that funny.

I love seeing somebody act real earnest and serious, like Jackie Gleason. He makes me laugh because he reflects back to me my own serious-mindedness and how ridiculous it all is. It’s always easier to see somebody else in that position than yourself, and you laugh. It’s like the classic slipping on the banana peel, or someone getting hit by a pie in the face. Why do those things make us laugh? Is it from relief, like: Thank God it wasn’t me? Or is it something else: I’m being very serious now. I’m pontificating earnestly and solemnly about—POW! PIE IN THE FACE! The bust-up of certainty.

Up the coast of the New World, the ship bearing ten million bananas ground out its course, every minute the waste heaving brokenly around it more brilliant as the moon rose off the starboard bow and moved into the sky with effortless guile , unashamed of the stigmata blemishing the face she showed from the frozen fogs of the Grand Banks to the jungles of Brazil where along the Rio Branco they knew her for a girl who loved her brother the sun; and the sun, suspicious, trapped her in her evil passion by drawing a blackened hand across her face, leaving the marks which betrayed her and betray her still.

Her hair rustled, brushing her shoulders. There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can't bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured. "I think I understand." "I love your honest heart, Mikage. The grandmother who raised you must have been a wonderful person." I smiled. "She was." "You've been lucky," said Eriko. She laughed, her back to me.

I like to save things. Not important things like whales or people or the environment. Silly things. Porcelain bells, the kind you get at souvenir shops. Cookie cutters you’ll never use, because who needs a cookie in the shape of a foot? Ribbons for my hair. Love letters. Of all the things I save, I guess you could say my love letters are my most prized possession. I keep my letters in a teal hatbox my mom bought me from a vintage store downtown. They aren’t love letters that someone else wrote for me; I don’t have any of those. These are ones I’ve written. There’s one for every boy I’ve ever loved—five in all. When I write, I hold nothing back. I write like he’ll never read it. Because he never will. Every secret thought, every careful observation, everything I’ve saved up inside me, I put it all in the letter. When I’m done, I seal it, I address it, and then I put it in my teal hatbox. They’re not love letters in the strictest sense of the word. My letters are for when I don’t want to be in love anymore. They’re for good-bye. Because after I write my letter, I’m no longer consumed by my all-consuming love. I can eat my cereal and not wonder if he likes bananas over his Cheerios too; I can sing along to love songs and not be singing them to him. If love is like a possession, maybe my letters are like my exorcisms. My letters set me free. Or at least they’re supposed to.

He was a man who didn’t own a mobile phone, as a matter of principle and stubborn pride. He loved it when people were shocked to discover he had never owned one, never would own one. He truly believed it made him morally superior, which drove Joy bananas because, excuse me, he was not. The way he talked about his “stance” on mobile phones, you would think he were the lone person in the crowd not giving the Nazi salute. Before their retirement he told people, “I don’t need a phone, I’m a tennis coach, not a surgeon. There are no tennis emergencies.” There were so tennis emergencies, and more than once over the years she’d been furious when she couldn’t contact him and she was left in a tricky situation that would have been instantly solved if he’d owned a phone. Also, his principles didn’t prevent him from happily picking up the landline and calling Joy on her mobile when she was at the shops, to ask how much longer she’d be, or to please buy more chili crackers, but when Stan was gone, he was gone, and if she thought about that too much and all it implied she could tap into a great well of rage, so she didn’t think about it.

Jennifer had exactly five pounds, six shillings, and fourpence halfpenny when she left No. 7 Maple Street. She lugged her two suitcases along with her into various buses, and arrived at Paddington with three-quarters of an hour to wait before the twelve o’clock train should bear her away from London forever. Thirty-two shillings and sixpence of her capital went on her third-class ticket, and three shillings more on a cup of coffee, two rashers of bacon, and a banana, for she had eaten no breakfast. During this wait she had time to think over her crazy flight from the boardinghouse. It had been her home since she was six years old, and she had left her mother without one pang of regret. “I must be terribly unnatural,” thought Jennifer sadly. “But it can’t be helped. I was probably born without a heart; I believe some people are.” She

So once the zookeeper realized it was the monkeys who stole the bananas, he knew there was only one way he'd be able to get them back." "How?" I whispered. My throat was so sore. "Don't talk. He had to beat them in shuffleboard, of course." "What?" "I said don't talk. Monkeys love shuffleboard." He used a page from a homework assignment he'd failed and a stack of quarters to make a shuffleboard court. I watched the monkeys and the zookeepers have their showdown while I sipped the last of my applejuice. "Need more?" Graham asked me without looking up, when my straw skidded against the dry bottom of the box. "Uh uh." "You're supposed to drink juice." "I just drank some." "More, though." I shook my head. "Drink more juice or the monkeys are going to kill you. The only thing they love more than shuffleboard is beating up dehydrated sick boys.

If asked about Carlos, Less always calls him “one of my oldest friends.” The date of their first encounter can be pinpointed precisely: Memorial Day, 1987. Less can even remember what each of them wore: he, a green Speedo, Carlos, the same in bright banana. Each with a white-wine spritzer in hand, like a pistol, eyeing the other from across the deck. A song was playing, Whitney Houston wanting to dance with somebody. Shadow of a sequoia falling between them. With somebody who loved her. Oh, to have a time machine and a video camera! To capture thin pink-gold Arthur Less and brawny nut-brown Carlos Pelu in their youth, when your narrator was only a child! But who needs a camera? Surely, for each of them, that scene replays itself whenever the other’s name is mentioned. Memorial Day, spritzer, sequoia, somebody. And each smiles and says the other is “one of my oldest friends.” When of course they hated each other on sight.

Just as Drake turned six weeks old, I decided I wanted to lose some baby weight. Chip and I were both still getting used to the idea that we had a baby of our own now, but I felt it was okay to leave him with Chip for a half hour or so in the mornings so I could take a short run up and down Third Street. I left Drake in the little swing he loved, kissed Chip good-bye, and off I went. Chip was so sweet and supportive. When I got back he was standing in the doorway saying, “Way to go, baby!” He handed me a banana and asked if I’d had any cramps or anything. I hadn’t. I actually felt great. I walked in and discovered Chip had prepared an elaborate breakfast for me, as if I’d run a marathon or something. I hadn’t done more than a half-mile walk-run, but he wanted to celebrate the idea that I was trying to get myself back together physically. He’d actually driven to the store and back and bought fresh fruit and real maple syrup and orange juice for me. I sat down to eat, and I looked over at Drake. He was sound asleep in his swing, still wearing nothing but his diaper. “Chip, did you take Drake to the grocery store without any clothes on?” Chip gave me a real funny look. He said, “What?” I gave him a funny look back. “Oh my gosh,” he said. “I totally forgot Drake was here. He was so quiet.” “Chip!” I yelled, totally freaked out. I was a first-time mom. Can you imagine? Anyone who’s met Chip knows he can get a little sidetracked, but this was our child! He was in that dang swing that just made him perfectly silent. I felt terrible. It had only been for a few minutes. The store was just down the street. But I literally got on my knees to beg for Jo’s forgiveness.

Dylan, my man!" Kyle Martinez jogged up from the direction of the parking lot and slapped Dylan on the back. "Is Hannah giving you the 4-1-1 on Red Rocks? This girl knows it all." "Yeah," chimed in Paul Hume, who had appeared on Dylan's other side. "It's hard to believe that someone so hot could have brains, too!" Kyle made an over exaggerated point at Hannah from behind his hand as he whispered to Dylan, "Major hottie." "Hottie!" Colby repeated as he joined the gang gathered on the front lawn. "Are you guys talking about Hannah Banana? She, like, defines the word babe.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

When someone’s been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit. That’s why you can’t save it all up like that. Because by the time you finally see each other, you’re catching up only on the big things, because it’s too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life. Like a month ago when Daddy slipped on a banana peel, a literal banana peel that Kitty had dropped on the kitchen floor. Kitty and I laughed for ages. I should have e-mailed Margot about it right away; I should have taken a picture of the banana peel. Now everything feels like you had to be there and oh never mind, I guess it’s not that funny. Is this how people lose touch? I didn’t think that could happen with sisters. Maybe with other people, but never us. Before Margot left, I knew what she was thinking without having to ask; I knew everything about her. Not anymore. I don’t know what the view looks like outside her window, or if she still wakes up early every morning to have a real breakfast or if maybe now that she’s at college she likes to go out late and sleep in late. I don’t know if she prefers Scottish boys to American boys now, or if her roommate snores. All I know is she likes her classes and she’s been to visit London once. So basically I know nothing. And so does she. There are big things I haven’t told her—how my letters got sent out. The truth about me and Peter. The truth about me and Josh. I wonder if Margot feels it too. The distance between us. If she even notices. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han