{David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest/ Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug wr. c. 1876/ Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters/ IDK You Yet, Song by Alexander 23/ Robert Desnos/ Albert Camus, from a letter to María Casares written c. June 1944/ Emily Brontë, from The Collected Novels; "Wuthering Heights,"/ Caroline George, Dearest Josephine/ Srinivas Mishra/ Unknown/ Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, Christmas, 1948/ Unknown}
“The sadness of the past is with me always.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (via therepublicofletters)
“everything beautiful in us / is already / dying.”
— — Gwen Benaway, from day/break (via lifeinpoetry)
“yes, our story ended. i lost you without warning, without justice, without meaning; but somewhere, out there in time, in an alternative universe, we’re meeting for the first time, i look at your lips eagerly, you laugh. somewhere out there we have a whole future ahead of us, an unlimited number of days. and that is not sad, darling. that is beautiful.”
— and until we meet again, i will carry you with me. // V.R. (via liethargy)
and I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best my little dove...
absolute solitude: selected poems, dulce maria loynaz (tr. james o'connor) // the glass essay, anne carson // boyish, japanese breakfast // @uglyfruit // yves olade // hunger, harry styles // a not admitting of the wound, emily dickinson // no surprises, radiohead // fourth of july, sufjan stevens
“You’re supposed to grow out of horridness, aren’t you? I don’t think I ever grew out of mine. Sometimes I think it’s still inside me, like something nasty I swallowed, that got stuck…”
— Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (via antigonick)
Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? / @/oceaii (tumblr) / Liv Ullmann Changing / The Elektra Complex / Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman from "Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry / unknown / @/violentcherries (tumblr) / @/nutnoce (tumblr) / Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea / unknown
i. Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? [ "This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot." ]
ii. @/oceaii (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a deer. The deer looks forwards in the first panel and turns back to face the audience in the second panel. "Turn and face / the person you've become." ]
iii. Liv Ullmann Changing [ "I will never forget the loneliness I knew as a child. For a period in my life I hid behind a mask. Did not want to acknowledge any longing. / Now it is a part of me-something I can share. / Both the loneliness and the longing." ]
iv. The Elektra Complex [ "If you were to peel the skin of me apart as a fig's, you would finally understand. I am my mother's daughter. From poisoned seeds sprout poisoned fruits." ]
v. Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman [ "I didn't want / to be the dead star / that uses borrowed light to survive." ]
vi. unknown [ Black and white illustration of two deer. They are both labeled with words. The deer in the background says "just be." The deer in the foreground replies "just being is the hardest part." ]
vii. @/violentcherries (tumblr) [ "the environment you are not thriving in is not yours forever / IT'S OKAY TO LEAVE / ... / IT'S OKAY to abandon the things you used to love" ]
viii. @/nutnoce (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a scorpion doing chores. It's tail just barely curls over the front of a clothes line. Various pairs of socks hang from the clothes line. It stands before a bucket with more clothes inside. "I come from the toughest, meanest place you can imagine. / I want to be gentle, I want to die gently, but / It seems that when life gets hard / I have to get harder to match." ]
ix. Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea [ "I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar." ]
x. unknown [ "1. Man is a MORAL animal. / 2. You can get human beings to do anything - IF you can convince them it is moral. / 3. You can convince human beings that anything is moral." ]
All of us like stairs, one step after another, going up, going down, but always going the same way.
Letter to My Rage: An Evolution - Lidia Yuknavitch / Lady Snowblood / Autumn Sonata (x) / The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera / On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong / Milk and Honey - Rupi Kaur / The Joy Luck Club / Enough - Suzanne Buffam / x / The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch / Lake Mungo / Family Tree (Intro) - Ethel Cain
“I suffer because of myself. It is my own soul all the time that is bothering me.”
— Henry Miller, from a letter to Anaïs Nin featured in A Literate Passion: Letters Of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller (1932 - 1953)
you tried being GENTLE, you tried being KIND…
& IN THE END— you found it made you even more cruel.