February 2012
67 posts
“I decided to accept as true my own thinking.”
– Georgia O’Keeffe (via journalofanobody)
1 tag
Ceilia Woloch, "Fireflies"
saturnrising:
And these are my vices: impatience, bad temper, wine, the more than occasional cigarette, an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed, a hunger that isn’t hunger but something like fear, a staunching of dread and a taste for bitter gossip of those who’ve wronged me—for bitterness— and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart to children whose names I don’t even know and driving...
2 tags
“I feel the tug of gravity
which everyone who knows you feels,
but turn and...”
– from Gemini, Mark Haddon (via cartographe)
1 tag
“The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good...”
– Joan Didion, from “On Keeping a Notebook” (via yesyes)
2 tags
Margaret Atwood, from "Girl Without Hands"
Walking through the ruins on your way to work that do not look like ruins with the sunlight pouring over the seen world like hail or melted silver, that bright and magnificent, each leaf and stone quickened and specific in it, and you can’t hold it, you can’t hold any of it. Distance surrounds you, marked out by the ends of your arms when they are stretched to their fullest. You can...
“I live in my dreams—that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not...”
– Herman Hesse, Demian (via human-voices)
3 tags
David Whyte, “Self Portrait”
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.
I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living,...
3 tags
D. A. Powell, "Abandonment Under the Walnut Tree"
Something seems to have gnawed that walnut leaf.
You face your wrinkles, daily, in the mirror. But the wrinkles are so slimming, they rather flatter.
Revel in the squat luck of that unhappy tree, who can’t take a mate from among the oaks or gums.
Ah, but if I could I would, the mirror version says, because he speaks to you. He is your truer self all dopey in the glass. He...
“Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone...”
– Octavio Paz, from “Homage to Claudio Ptolemy” (via the-final-sentence)
4 tags
“last of the sun / the letter of apology / half-written”
– Jon Baldwin (via weissewiese)
1 tag
“My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought...”
– James Hillman, from “The Force of Character”(via veareflejos)
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of...”
– Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
(via thewayitstopsandstarts)
2 tags
Stephen Dunn, "Stone Seeking Warmth"
Look, it’s usually not a good idea to think seriously about me. I’ve been known to give others a hard time. I’ve had wives and lovers— trust that I know a little about trying to remain whole while living a divided life. I don’t easily open up. If you come to me, come to me so warned. I am smooth and grayish. It’s possible my soul is made of schist.
But if you are not dissuaded by now, ...
“Pain’s first casualty is proportion.”
– V. Penelope Pelizzon, from “Seven Penitential Psalms”
Nickole Brown, from "How To Forgive"
make room without throwing a single thing out
to clutter the world. you are not mercury for the mouths of fish,
not a plume of smoke to lift hollow bones. do not throw it
like a bottle from an overpass onto a speeding car, do not wait
for it to seed as you wait tentacled in sleeping beauty’s hair.
listen to me, i know...
3 tags
James Allen Hall, "Brief History of My Mother"
My mother, fourteen, makes a girl eat an entire can of Alpo.
At forty, she leaves her husband for a man who wears women’s underwear.
Every Friday night of my childhood, she’s criminal. The door creaks open for the same cop, his broad smile.
Bank of America calls for Marsha Hall. I’m not in right now, she says.
My mother, thirteen, smokes mentholated cigarettes. The burn dissolves to a...
“Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?”
– Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited
1 tag
“You know I am not particularly tender; I’ve had to strike and to fend off....”
– Joseph Conrad, from “Heart of Darkness”
“There is nothing better than imagining other worlds … to forget the painful one...”
– Umberto Eco, Baudolino (via underpaidgenius)
2 tags
“People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are...”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (via devilduck)
1 tag
Umberto Fiori, "Slide"
A playground, in a park. One lady raises to the top of the slide a ball of newspaper, gives it a kiss: “Ready … set … go!” Another holds a lampshade in her hands, smoothing its chenille bangs. “My daughter, you should see her dance— she’s already won two prizes.” “Did I tell you mine—he’s three—can already write?” A girl, in line behind them with her son, is listening. She tightens her grip on his...
1 tag
Anne Carson's new book 'Antigonick' →
1 tag
“In the multiple peregrinations of love, Sabina was quick to recognize the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones, particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died completely and left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller echoes. […]A partial resemblance could stir...
1 tag
“It’s like going around a mirrorless world asking everyone you meet to describe...”
– Diane Arbus (via dialogues)
“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he...”
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (via absea)
Jonathan Galassi, from “Girlhood”
How else will you know the color of crushed time; how else will you feel what it is to change and remember, to lose and absorb this summer inside you
(via ahuntersheart)
1 tag
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension,...”
– Anaïs Nin (via killthecashcow)
2 tags
Erica Jong, Penis Envy
I envy men who can yearn with infinite emptiness toward the body of a woman, hoping that the yearning will make a child, that the emptiness itself will fertilize the darkness. Women have no illusions about this, being at once houses, tunnels, cups & cupbearers, knowing emptiness as a temporary state between two fullnesses, & seeing no romance in it. If I were a man doomed to...
1 tag
“In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That...”
– Pascal Mercier (via mirroir)