Why Are You Sitting There So Silently, / Like Someone Mute, Eating Your Heart,

Audre Lorde, from The Black Unicorn: Poems; “Journeystones I-XI”

[Text ID: “my heart grows / confused / between your need for love / and your need for destruction.”]

From Khaled Hosseini’s, A Thousand Splendid Suns

how’s that house that raised you?

// Rainer Maria Rilke. Selected Letters, 1902-1922

— Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 1: 1931-1934) (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Katherine Cox, featured in The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf

"For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to want to continue looking like girls." — Excerpt from Susan Sontag's 1978 essay The Double Standard of Aging