February 2012
2 tags
“I think it’s really important to go to your room and sit there. I couldn’t mean...”
– Stephen Dunn (adapted from wwnorton)
“I seek a safe place
For my mother’s scent
And I hide the rose in my blood.
...”
– Hassan Najmi, “The War” (translated by Khaled Mattawa) (via sharingpoetry and weissewiese)
5 tags
“…that this death fails to destroy me altogether means that I want to live...”
– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (translated by Richard Howard)
1 tag
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“After this deluge
I wish to see the dove
saved,
nothing but the dove.
I...”
– Ingeborg Bachmann, “After this Deluge” (translated by Johannes Beilharz)
1 tag
“In the hollow of my mute being
place a word—
grow forests thick on...”
– Ingeborg Bachmann, from “Psalm” (translated by Mark Anderson)
1 tag
“if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not...”
– Samuel Beckett, from “Cascando” (adapted from sharingpoetry)
1 tag
1 tag
“Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
– Anne Carson, from “Tag” (adapted from semperaugustus)
2 tags
“And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of...”
– Dana Gioia, from “Do Not Expect“
2 tags
“Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books,...”
– Jeanette Winterson, from Why I adore the night (via mirroir)
1 tag
“I have no need for words.
The sleet on the windows,
the slow breathing of you...”
– Patricia Kennedy Bostian, from “Sunday Afternoon”
2 tags
“When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that...”
– Wislawa Szymborska, from “I’m Working on the World” in Poems New and Collected, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh (via proustitute)
3 tags
“I apologize to everything that I cannot be everywhere.
I apologize to everyone...”
– Wisława Szymborska, from “Under a Certain Little Star” (trans. by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire)
“The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.”
– Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault (via doubledaybooks)
January 2012
4 tags
“O night,
you take the petals
of the roses in your hand,
but leave the stark...”
– H. D., from “Evening”
2 tags
“Who was it that took away my voice?
The black wound he left in my throat...”
– Bella Akhmadulina, from “Silence” (translated by Daniel Halpern) (via ekphora)
6 tags
“The days grow and the stars cross over
And my wild bed turns slowly among the...”
– Muriel Rukeyser, “Darkness Music”
3 tags
“When fear crawls out in the evenings from all four corners, when the winter...”
– Elsa Binder, 30 January 1942, from Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (edited by Alexandra Zapruder)
Elsa Binder wrote eloquently and passionately about the destruction of the Jewish community in Stanislawow, Poland. Her diary was found in a ditch on the way to an execution...
2 tags
“Let me lie alone on my back in tall grass and see the sun and the water droplets...”
– Rachel Corrie, from Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie
1 tag
1 tag
59 Things You Didn't Know About Virginia Woolf →
A few of my favorites:
After getting married, Woolf thought she should learn some domestic skills, so she enrolled in a school of cookery. Shortly after, she accidentally baked her wedding ring in a suet pudding.
Woolf listened to Beethoven’s late quartets while writing The Waves.
Woolf once discovered a diary she had written during one particular sane and lucid period in her life, and laughed...
2 tags
“‘No,’ she said. ‘Some things you don’t understand, of course.’
‘Of course,’...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (via hauntingcontradiction)
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1 tag
“It’s not you I’ve lost,
but the world.”
– Ingeborg Bachmann, from “A Kind of Loss” (translated from the German by Mark Anderson)
1 tag
“The beauty of things must be that they end.”
– Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (via honeyforthehomeless)
“Let me hear the wind paging through the trees
and see the stars flaring out,...”
– Edward Hirsch, from “I Was Never Able to Pray” (via proustitute)
“I am the inert figure behind the barren apple tree.
The one who wonders for...”
– Laura Kasischke, from “Landscape with one of the earthworm’s ten hearts”
2 tags
2 tags
“A creator can only do one thing, he can only continue, that is all he can do.”
– Gertrude Stein, from Picasso
2 tags
“Language is a darkness pulled out of us.”
– Stanley Plumly, from “Infidelity” (via literary verve)
3 tags
“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on...”
– Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West (via brainpickings)
1 tag
“Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall...”
– Jennifer Michael Hecht, “September”
“there is no action kind enough to express heartbreak.
I am left
shut,
the...”
– Stella Padnos, from “Start/The Stopping”
1 tag
“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost...”
– Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (via literary verve)
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“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind … It is no...”
– Carson McCullers (via apoetreflects)
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“Who hasn’t asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”
– Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (via millionsmillions)
“Mourn us all in one.
We are all dead.”
– Euripides, Herakles, translated by Anne Carson in Grief Lessons (via proustitute)
3 tags
“Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
...”
– Tony Hoagland, from “The Word”
3 tags
She pressed her lips to mind. — A typo
How many years I must have yearned for someone’s lips against mind. Pheromones, newly born, were floating between us. There was hardly any air.
She kissed me again, reaching that place that sends messages to toes and fingertips, then all the way to something like home. Some music was playing on its own.
Nothing like a woman...
3 tags
“I was not afraid of horror, I was afraid of beauty, of what it could do to me if...”
– Vanessa Veselka, Zazen (via redlmnd)
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“What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element...”
– Willa Cather (via apoetreflects)
1 tag
“Nights are long just now,
short though
when twilight is...”
– Paavo Haavikko, from “The Short Year” (translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas)
“When I turn towards you
in bed, I have a feeling
of stepping into a church...”
–
Henrik Nordbrandt, from “Our Love Is Like Byzantium” (translated from the Danish by the author and Alexander Taylor)