"When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark."
"I apologize to everything that I cannot be everywhere.
I apologize to everyone that I cannot be every man and woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can justify me,
because I myself am an obstacle to myself.
Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and later try hard to make them seem light."
– Wisława Szymborska, from “Under a Certain Little Star” (trans. by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire)
"Who was it that took away my voice?
The black wound he left in my throat
Can’t even cry."
– Bella Akhmadulina, from “
Silence” (translated by Daniel Halpern) (via
ekphora)
"The days grow and the stars cross over
And my wild bed turns slowly among the stars."
– Muriel Rukeyser, “Darkness Music”
"When fear crawls out in the evenings from all four corners, when the winter storm raging outside tells you it is winter, and that it is difficult to live in the winter, when my soul trembles at the sight of distant fantasies, I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat, every pulse, every piece of my soul—liberation. In such moments it hardly matters where it is going to come from and who will bring it, so long as it’s faster and comes sooner. Doubts are growing in my soul. Quiet! Blessed be he who brings good news, no matter from where, no matter to where. Time, go ahead. Time, which carries liberation in its unknown tomorrow…maybe not for me, but for people like me. The result is certain. Down with any doubts. Everything comes to an end. Spring will come."
"
‘No,’ she said. ‘Some things you don’t understand, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Helen agreed. ‘So now you can go ahead and be a person on your own account,’ she added.
The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.
"
Happy 130th Birthday to Virginia Woolf!
"It’s not you I’ve lost,
but the world."
– Ingeborg Bachmann, from “A Kind of Loss” (translated from the German by Mark Anderson)
