the garden in my head

[abridgeto]

19 Books That Have Helped People Through Some Seriously Tough Times

Reading a really good book is a form of self-care too.

[quoted-books]

I want to work at a library someday,“ I said. "I want to spend every waking day of my adult life surrounded by books.

Tracey Garvis Graves, The Girl He Used to Know (via quoted-books)

[quoted-books]

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (via quoted-books)

[alcoholiques]

He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world.

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor (via alcoholiques)

[thatsjustginarose]

my aesthetic: ezra miller saying that if he had a wand, he would use his power to destroy the patriarchy.

[active-minds]

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Dear Sugar, “Tiny Beautiful Things” (via active-minds)

[funnyskullgrin]

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

Cheryl Strayed, “The Future has an Ancient Heart” (via funnyskullgrin)

[oliveandsage]

Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

Cheryl Strayed (via oliveandsage)

[ichise]

[hanae-ichihara]

☆ April: Month of Anime Requests ★

↪ April 21 { When Marnie Was There } Requested by: @anonymous ↩

[kotsume]

[apoemaday]

All You Who Sleep Tonight

by Vikram Seth

All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right And emptiness above–

Know that you aren’t alone The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all their years.

[abridgeto]

[abridgeto]

Between Us by Nizar Qabbani

Between us twenty years of age between your lips and my lips when they meet and stay the years collapse the glass of a whole life shatters. The day I met you I tore up all my maps an my prophecies like an Arab stallion I smelled the rain of you before it wet me heard the pulse of your voice before you spoke undid your hair with my hands before you had braided it There is nothing I can do nothing you can do what can the wound do with the knife on the way to it? Your eyes are like a night of rain in which ships are sinking and all I wrote is forgotten In mirrors there is no memory. God how is it that we surrender to love giving it the keys to our city carrying candles to it and incense falling down at its feet asking to be forgiven Why do we look for it and endure all that it does to us all that it does to us? Woman in whose voice silver and wine mingle in the rains From the mirrors of your knees the day begins its journey life puts out to sea I knew when I said I love you that I was inventing a new alphabet for a city where no one could read that I was saying my poems in an empty theater and pouring my wine for those who could not taste it. When God gave you to me I felt that He had loaded everything my way and unsaid all His sacred books. Who are you woman entering my life like a dagger mild as the eyes of a rabbit soft as the skin of a plum pure as strings of jasmine innocent as children's bibs and devouring like words? Your love threw me down in a land of wonder it ambushed me like the scent of a woman stepping into an elevator it surprised me in a coffee bar sitting over a poem I forgot the poem It surprised me reading the lines in my palm I forgot my palm It dropped on me like a blind deaf wildfowl its feathers became tangled with mine its cries were twisted with mine It surprised me as I sat on my suitcase waiting for the train of days I forgot the days I traveled with you to the land of wonder Your image is engraved on the face of my watch It is engraved on each of the hands It is etched on the weeks months years My time is no longer mine it is you

Nizar Qabbani

[abridgeto]

Great Writers on the Letters of the Alphabet, Illustrated by David Hockney

A choral serenade to the building blocks of language starring Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Amis, Doris Lessing, John Updike, and more titans of literature.

[abridgeto]

James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil

Rigorous lessons are not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically relevant ones.

[thedeviljudges]

[abridgeto]

this!