"A thick darkness, unlit by any star, still glazed the windows. Every lamp in my room burned, to keep the dark outside, yet it seemed still to encroach on me, to be present beside me but as if masked by my lights, the night like a permeable substance that could seep into my skin."
— Angela Carter, from “The Bloody Chamber”
"The day broke around me like a cool dream.
Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea—a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continuously on the point of melting."
— Angela Carter, from “The Bloody Chamber“
"In the middle of the night,
I wake without breath
and write my name over and over again
to keep myself from disappearing."
— Gillian Sze, from “Located”
"They love the way she gathers her hair,
her fingers minding her hairline,
combing from the forehead,
down to the temples,
behind the ears.
Yes: she is ordinary, like most people;
but how lucky they are to witness
her miss the last tendril,
the one that sticks to her neck,
curled like a crescent moon.
"
— Gillian Sze, “Bun”
"When the pain blazed in his chest,
I want to believe he saw
only light as he melted into it.
You know where your father’s
life is now? my friend asked
and gave me without a pause
these words, It’s in you."
— Margaret Gibson, from “Elegy For My Father”
"I’m alone
in a body that can’t
love me."
— Margaret Gibson, from “The Waiting”
"The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”
"
— Tomas Tranströmer, from “Vermeer” (translated by Robert Bly) (via jeanetteleblanc)
"I am interested in impossible embodiments. I wish to write; I wish to write about certain things that cannot be held. I want to create a sea of freely-flowing words of no definite form and shape waves of fluent exactness."
— Virginia Woolf, Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
"
When we are going toward someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers
word matches word
how easy to be together.
When we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.
We are not different nor alike
but each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving is an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.
— Marge Piercy, “Simple Song” (via Inward Bound Poetry)
"
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
"— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"You tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love."
— Warsan Shire, “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love,” (via sotla)
"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning of the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them."
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"The desire to live could not be dictated to you. You could not be happy on command, whether the order was given by you or by someone else. The moments of happiness you knew came unbidden. You could understand their sources, but you could not reproduce them."
— Edouard Levé, Suicide (translated by Jan Steyn)
"Death is a country of which nothing is known; no one has returned to describe it."
— Edouard Levé, Suicide (translated by Jan Steyn)
