January 2011
74 posts
1 tag
“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for...
1 tag
Rosemary Tonks, "Story of a Hotel Room"
Thinking we were safe – insanity! We went in to make love. All the same Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom. Then in the gloom… … And who doesn’t not know that pair of shutters With the awkward hook on them All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom We set about acquiring one another Urgently! But on a temporary basis Only as guests – just guests of one another’s...
1 tag
“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from...”
– Carl Gustav Jung (via human-voices)
H.D., stanza VII of "Eurydice"
“At least I have the flowers of myself, and my thoughts, no god can take that; I have the fervour of myself for a presence and my own spirit for light; and my spirit with its loss knows this; though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.”
...
“As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading or writing, you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges – toward something else, something not yet grasped. The unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to...
“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors...”
– Angela Carter, from The Lady of the House of Love (via ghostwhowalks)
1 tag
“At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string...”
– Alberto Manguel (via thesearepeopleyouknow)
Where is my Mind (Pixies) - Maxence Cyrin
...
1 tag
Rumi, "My Worst Habit"
My worst habit is I get so tired of winter I become a torture to those I’m with. If you’re not here, nothing grows. I lack clarity. My words tangle and knot up. How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river. How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you. When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean. There is a secret medicine given only to those...
1 tag
Marianne Moore, "Sojourn in the Whale"
Trying to open locked doors with a sword, threading
the points of needles, planting shade trees
upside down; swallowed by the opaqueness of one whom the seas
love better than they love you, Ireland—
you have lived and lived on every kind of shortage.
You have been compelled by hags to spin
gold thread from straw and have heard men say:
"There is a feminine temperament in direct...
“Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and...”
– Alice Walker (via devilduck)
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the...”
– John Cage (via dreamofwhatcanbe)
“Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All...”
– William Gibson (theonlyadventureleft via crashinglybeautiful)
1 tag
1 tag
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their...
Arab Strap, “Cherubs”
1 tag
Sharon Olds, "I Go Back To May 1937"
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they...
1 tag
“For me, there’s no difference between dream and reality. I never know if what...”
– Man Ray (sublimistika via billyjane)
“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
– Seneca (solfey via curious—mind)
1 tag
Antonio Machado, from "Last Night as I Was...
Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.
(via ofravens)
1 tag
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”
— Flannery O’Connor, from Wise Blood
(fireandether via frenchtwist)
“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced...”
– Anaïs Nin, from “Henry and June”
“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
-Margaret Atwood,...
“As a kid, she had always told the raunchiest jokes. As an adult, she could rip...”
– Lorrie Moore, Willing (via syllablefingers)
1 tag
Margaret Atwood, "We are Hard"
l.
We are hard on each other and call it honesty, choosing our jagged truths with care and aiming them across the neutral table. The things we say are true; it is our crooked aims, our choices turn them criminal. ll. Of course your lies are more amusing: you make them new each time. Your truths, painful and boring repeat themselves over and over perhaps because you own so few of...
1 tag
Anne Sexton, "The Love Plant"
A freak but moist flower tangles up my lungs, knits into my heart, crawls up my throat and sucks like octopi on my tongue. You planted it happily last summer and I let it take root with my moon-hope, not knowing it would come to crowd me out, to explode inside me this March. All winter trying to diminish it, I felt it enlarge. But of course never spoke to you of this, for my sanity was awful...
2 tags
Michael Nyman, ‘The Heart Asks Pleasure...
“I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is...”
– Anne Sexton
1 tag
Erica Jong, "The Muse Who Came To Stay"
You are the first muse who came to stay. The others began & ended with a wish, or a glance or a kiss between stanzas; the others strode away in the pointed boots of their fear
or were kicked out by the stiletto heels of mine, or merely padded away in bare feet when the ground was too hard or cold or as hot as white sand baked under the noonday sun.
But you flew in on the wings of your smile,...
