I am fragile and unholy. Open. Ravage. Eat.

Tanaka Mhishi, Literary Sexts II

What was it like to lose him?” Asked Sorrow. There was a long pause before I responded: “It was like hearing every goodbye ever said to me—said all at once.

Lang Leav

I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.

Ernest Hemingway,��The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

‘I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet��

And maybe I had miles to drive And promises to keep You ditch it all to stay alive A thousand kisses deep

Leonard Cohen, ‘THOUSAND KISSES DEEP���, The Book of Longing

And the sky was made of amethyst And all the stars look just like little fish You should learn when to go You should learn how to say no ... Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to

Hole - “Violet” (via 69rooms)

I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair.

Helen Oyeyemi, from “drownings,” What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours 

I push my face / against a window the size of your palm where / beyond the shore / a grey dawn lifts the hem of your purple dress / & I ignite

Ocean Vuong, from “My Father Writes from Prison,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds

I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else.

Jamaica Kincaid, from The Autobiography of My Mother

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through. I had carried my own life in my own hands.

Jamaica Kincaid, from The Autobiography of My Mother 

There is a viscous porosity of flesh – my flesh and the flesh of the world. This porosity is a hinge through which we are and of the world.

Nancy Tuana

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love”

Love means …             – you are mine.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), from “Poem Of The End” (1924), translated from the Russian by Mary Jane White“Любовь, это значит…          – Мой.“ 

…but if I ran away from it, tried not to know or understand, stopped caring (or being hurt or angry at how the world goes), then I’d be guilty not only of ineffectuality but also of cowardice. I hate what happens in these times, but ignoring it won’t change it.

Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

That’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

Khaled Hosseini 

Slow is often overlooked in rushed culture. Its’ oracle is not acknowledged, properly understood, or respected. The slow breath. A slow first kiss. Slowly disrobing in front of a lover. Slow lovemaking. Slow to get up out of a warm bed. Slow stretching. Slow yoga. Slow bathing. Slow and steady. Slowly walking through an airport to catch a flight. Slow decision-making. Slow crockpot cooking. Slow eating. Slow creativity. The pause before we speak. When we give ourselves (our cells) permission to slow down, our whole system is met in a magical place where regeneration and rejuvenation naturally begin to occur without any effort from us.

India Ame’ye, Author, Energy of Gods 

Tell me, am I still under your spell?

poeticdonut 

—the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can’t boil down to pure ‘good’ or pure 'bad’ like you always want to do—? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

I am wholly filled with you,

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written c. December 1912 

I want to make Romeo jealous! I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

Oscar Wilde