A Writer's Ruminations

"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)

"In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain."

— Edouard Levé, Suicide (translated by Jan Steyn)

"Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald , Winter Dreams  (via seabois)

(via feuille-d-automne)

"Her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air."

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (via birdonwing)

"Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?"

— Jacqueline Berger, from “The Failure of Language” (via ahuntersheart)

"

I had the dream where you read your own poems,
Like those written sometime ago,
only these were in the grey book
written after death…

And you look finer, paler and tinier every passing moment,
Then you disappear.

The last to vanish were your hands
And only the poems were left unharmed
And in the poems was left
someone’s heart.

— Grażyna Chrostowska, “The Dream” translated by Jarek Gajewski (via ophelia sings)

"The suffering touched me too early,
I have burned myself out,
I am the bright ash without desire.
Now, only the silence endures dearly,
When I am still standing in the fire."

— Grażyna Chrostowska, written in Ravensbrück 13th April 1942 translated by Jarek Gajewski (via ophelia sings)

"Moments are passing by, empty or bleak.
They are never as we wish.
Nobody’s day follows a beaten path.
Colorless and wasted, lost in helplessness,
And in every moment….
Think about this - life is passing, running out,
So what am I waiting for?
Though nothing abides."

— Grażyna Chrostowska, “Moments” translated by Jarek Gajewski (via ophelia sings)