我想了很久置顶帖该放什么，然后突然想到，没有比这个更合适的了。
这篇文章我是大二上在Principle of Rhetoric课上读到，然后瞬间爱上。
谨以此献给所有热爱写作的人。
I cannot say anything better.
而此心，未曾变。

格式我自己调的。
其实这篇文章很沉重，非常沉重，但是确实也是一篇很戳我点的东西...Word Times New Roman 12号 single sspace六页长的东西啊。
下楼放正文。

Before long my sister came to visit me, and I joked about taking her to a place called Kubla Khan and getting her a blind date with this vato named Coleridge who lived on the seacoast and was malias on morphine. When Iasked her to make a trip into enemy territory to buy me a grammar book, shesaid she couldn’t. Bookstores intimidated her, because she, too, could neitherread nor write.
Days later, with a stub pencil I whittled sharp with my teeth,I propped a Red Chief notebook on my knees and wrote my first words. From thatmoment, a hunger for poetry possessed me.
Until then, I had felt as if I had been born into a raging oceanwhere I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching ashoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a restingplace. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that andnothing more.
But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I feltan island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and morewords emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first timein my life. The island grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited bypeople I knew and mapped with the life I lived.
I wrote about it all-about people I had loved or hated, aboutthe brutalities and ecstasies of my life. And, for the first time, the child inme who had witnessed and endured unspeakable terrors cried out not just inimpotent despair, but with the power of language. Suddenly, through language, throughwriting, my grief and my joy could be shared with anyone who would listen. AndI could do this all alone; I could do it anywhere. I was no longer a captive ofdemons eating away at me, no longer a victim of other people’s mockery andloathing, that had made me clench my fist white with rage and grit my teeth tosilence. Words now pleaded back with the bleak lucidity of hurt. They werewrong, those others, and now I could say it.
Through language I was free. I could respond, escape, indulge;embrace or reject earth or the cosmos. I was launched on an endless journeywithout boundaries or rules, in which I could salvage the floating fragments ofmy past, or be born anew in the spontaneous ignition of understanding some heretoforeconcealed aspect of myself. Each word steamed with the hot lava juices of myprimordial making, and I crawled out of stanzas dripping with birth-blood,reborn and freed from the chaos of my life. The child in the dark room of myheart, that had never been able to find or reach the light switch, flicked iton now; and I found in the room a stranger, myself, who had waited so manyyears to speak again. My words struck in me lightning crackles of elation and thunderheadstorms of grief.
When I had been in the county jail longer than anyone else,I was made a trustee. One morning, after a fist fight,I wentto the unlocked and unoccupied office used for lawyer-client meetings, tothink. The bare white room with its fluorescent tube lighting seemed to exposeand illuminate my dark and worthless life. And yet, for the first time, I had somethingto lose-my chance to read, to write; a way to live with dignity and meaning,that had opened for me when I stole that scuffed, second-hand book about theRomantic poets. In prison, the abscess had been lanced.
“I will never do any work in this prison system as long as Iam not allowed to get my G.E.D.” That’s what I told the reclassification panel.The captain flicked off the tape recorder. He looked at me hard and said,‘You’ll never walk outta here alive. Oh, you’ll work, put a copper penny onthat, you’ll work.”
After that interview I was confined to deadlock maximum securityin a subterranean dungeon, with ground-level chicken-wired windows paintedgray. Twenty-three hours a day I was in that cell. I kept sane by borrowingbooks from the other cons on the tier. Then, just before Christmas, I receiveda letter from Harry, a charity house Samaritan who doled out hot soup to the homelessin Phoenix. He had picked my name from a list of cons who had no one to writeto them. I wrote back asking for a grammar book, and a week later received oneof Mary Baker Eddy’s treatises on salvation and redemption, with Spanish andEnglish on opposing pages. Pacing my cell all day and most of each night, Igrappled with grammar until I was able to write a long true-romance confessionfor a con to send to his pen pal. He paid me with a pack of smokes. Soon I hada thriving barter business, exchanging my poems and letters for novels,commissary pencils, and writing tablets.
One day I tore two flaps from the cardboard box that heldall my belongings and punctured holes along the edge of each flap and along theborder of a ream of state-issue paper. After I had aligned them to form aspine, I threadedthe holes with a shoestring, and sketched on thecover a hummingbird fluttering above a rose. This was my first journal.
Whole afternoons I wrote, unconscious of passing time orwhether it was day or night. Sunbursts exploded from the lead tip of my pencil,words that grafted me into awareness of who I was; peeled back to a burningcore of bleak terror, an embryo floating in the image of water, I cracked outof the shell wide-eyed and insane. Trees grew out of the palms of my hands, thethreatening otherness of life dissolved, and I became one with the air and sky,the dirt and the iron and concrete. There was no longer any distinction betweenthe other and I. Language made bridges of fire between me and everything I saw.I entered into the blade of grass, the basketball, the con’s eye and child’ssoul.
At night I flew. I conversed with floating heads in my cell,and visited strange houses where lonely women brewed tea and rocked in wickerrocking chairs listening to sad Joni Mitchell songs.

格式完全毁了尼玛啊...百度你坑爹啊...反正就这意思吧。