[lifeinpoetry]

“… come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”

— Lucille Clifton, from “won’t you celebrate with me”

[fairydrowning]

"I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood."

– Melissa Cox

"I'm homesick all the time," she said, still not looking at him "I just don't know where home is."

– Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

"I want to go home, but I don't know where it is."

– Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

[fairydrowning]

"I want to go home. I will always want to go home. Even when I am at home I want to go home. But I'm not really thinking of a place, it's more that feeling of everything finally being over, of seeing the light in the windows of your house on a cold night, of being safe, the relief of leaving a party you're not enjoying, like when you felt sick at school and they sent you home, or when you got upset at a sleepover and they called your parents. I want my mam to come get me. I want to go home."

– Via: "seashellronan" on Tumblr

[achhing]

Language hovers between a sharply circumscribed clarity and the necessity for silence: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof must remain silent.'

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays Volume 6 (1956-1963)

[achhing]

He consistently stressed the notion that the physical world and human culture were so complicated, so intricately tangled and commingled as to defy explanation.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays Volume 6 (1956-1963)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Aeschylus, tr. by Mary Lefkowitz and Romm James, from Plays; “Helen,”

[achhing]

[Text ID: Don’t grieve in advance, my love: no need to be prophet of pain.]

[ojibwa]

[achhing]

[Text ID: There is an ache in my chest I’ve known since childhood]

[violentwavesofemotion]

“Have you ever noticed when you’re tired, your fingers don’t grip things as tightly as they should? That things slip through them more often than you wish? I feel as though I am those fingers and life is slipping through me.”

— Kelsey Danielle, Life And Other Things (via violentwavesofemotion)

[metamorphesque]

— Anna Akhmatova, The Guest

[text ID: "What do you want?" I asked. / "To be with you in hell," he said.]

[metamorphesque]

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

[text ID: It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.]

[levcosia]

“When I think of you now, this is what I remember: That honest stories all end strangely.”

— Meg Charlton, from “To the Woman with the Restraining Order,” Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, ed. Colleen Kinder (Algonquin Books, 2022)  (via memoryslandscape)

[metamorphesque]

― Han Kang, The White Book.

[text ID: Learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.]

[soracities]

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[Text ID: “Alone, I often fall down into nothingness.”]

[lispectorisms-deactivated202301]

from “Kenzaburo Oe, The Art of Fiction No. 195,” interviewed by Sarah Fay, Paris Review (no. 183, Winter 2007)

[achhing]

[Text ID:

Interviewer: The narrators in your novels grasp the transcendental, but then it seems to elude them.

OE: My experience of the transcendental has always been a secondary one. I feel and comprehend it through those who have gone beyond the dimension that we know - poets like Yeats and Blake. In the end I have not reached a different dimension beyond where we are in this world, but I’ve been able to taste it through literature, and that for me is a reason for being.]

[quotemadness]

“She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.”

— Nicole Krauss

[electraheart2012]

— Ocean Vuong in conversation with Spencer Quong

[captioningposts]

[image id: partial transcript of the {interview} "survival as a creative force: an interview with ocean vuong" uploaded on june 9, 2019 featuring ocean vuong that reads:

"that's a beautiful question-and one i think we must navigate for the rest of our creative lives. i wonder if balance is possible, but i think in attempting it, we begin to parse out who we are, what made us, where we are going-all of which are means toward self-knowledge. i think that's what a novel is, at its core, one person trying to know themselves so throughly that they realize, in the end, it was the times they lived in, the people they touched and learned from, that made them real."

end image id]

[derangedrhythms]

Anne Sexton, Live or Die; from ‘Live’

[achhing]

[Text ID: Well, death’s been here for a long time -]

[soracities]

“The more I understand of myself and the more I understand of the temperament of those artists whom I admire, the more I am convinced that what separates talent from genius is nothing more nor less than confidence: the ability not to be frightened of making a fool of yourself. This is a dangerous thing to say. It opens the door to sheer bravura. But that is a very different thing from the kind of confidence I am talking about. Bravura comes from the desire to impress which in turn comes from the same fear of making a fool of yourself. The confidence I speak of is not made out of the opinions of others. It comes from solitude.”

— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time