or found his mirror there;

the only glass that would not break with that unbearable light

[milknjuice-deactivated20190908]

i’m trying a new thing called activities

[milknjuice-deactivated20190908]

“activities” is where you do different things like play an instrument or plant a garden

[flashfuneral]

tell me more

[milknjuice-deactivated20190908]

i’ve said too much already

[ahs013]

"your password is weak" well so is my memory so plz let me keep it

[artemisiasea]

People have been scared away from the “classics” by inadequate teachers, or led to believe that writers learn only from their contemporaries. A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff. If you don’t read widely, or read only writers in fashion at the moment, you’ll have a limited idea of what can be done with the English language.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (via artemisiasea)

[bookmania]

A candle loses nothing by lighting another.

Rumi (via bookmania)

[finita--la--commedia]

I have come to regard November as the older, harder man’s October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer’s death as winter tightens its grip.

Henry Rollins (via finita--la--commedia)

[antigonick]

Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (via antigonick)

[mauriacs]

mr darcy lived in derbyshire so he sounds like. lizzeh. ah lov yew moost ahhdentleh

[quasarkisses]

wait the places in pride and prejudice are real?

[metapianycist]

england is indeed real

[kipplekipple]

Crying

[ellisnightingale]

“Novembers are for softest sleep when skies are dark and grey. They do not mind the time you keep when night looks much like day. They do not mind the rain that falls so warmly down your cheek. ‘Rest easy now’ is what they’d say if months knew how to speak.”

— Ellis Nightingale

[megairea]

All the stars of your midnight and mine are riddled with wounds;

Faiz Ahmad Faiz, from In Your Eyes and Mine (tr. by Naomi Lazard)

[soracities]

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough.

Walt Whitman, from “I Sing the Body Electric”, Leaves of Grass (via soracities)

[ohproserpine-deactivated2015053]

I like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which I will again and again and again kiss

E. E. Cummings, excerpt of I Like My Body When It Is With Your (via camilla-macauley)

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

Anyway it will be autumn tomorrow or the next day: I can smell it in the air–summer smoldering.

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (via a-quiet-green-agreement)

[meowbitch1-deactivated20151124]

…the descent to the Underworld is easy. / night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, / but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air— / there the struggle, there the labor lies….

virgil, the aeneid, 6.149-52, translated by robert fagles (via meowbitch1)

[adrasteiax]

What shall I say to my urgent heart? Shall I refuse to go? If it is my calling heart, Shall I answer “No”?

Itzik Manger [translated by Leonard Wolf], from The Ballad Of The White Glow in “Poems Bewitched And Haunted” [selected and edited by John Hollander] (via adrasteiax)

[austinkleon]

I will end… with a little scene that took place in the last months of peace. They were the most terrible months of my life, for, helplessly and hopelessly, one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

Leonard Woolf, Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (via austinkleon)

[shock]

love being trusted with “you cant tell anyone this” conversations and nodding a lot and forgetting everything they told me like god intended and going down as a trustworthy individual while doing literally zero work of ill or good

[linguini17]

Amnesic neutral

[exhaled-spirals]

« Readers who don’t like books that are not printed television, fast on thrills and feeling, soft on the brain, are not criticizing literature, they are missing it altogether. A work of fiction, a poem, that is literature, that is art, can only be itself, can never be anything else. Nor can anything else substitute for it. The serious writer cannot be in competition for sales and attention with the bewildering range of products from the ever expanding leisure industry. She can only offer what she has ever offered: an exceptional sensibility combined with an exceptional control over words.

How many people want that? Proportionally as few as ever but art is not for the few but for the many […]. I believe that art puts down its roots into the deepest hiding places of our nature and that its action is akin to the action of certain delving plants, comfrey for instance, whose roots can penetrate far into the subsoil and unlock nutrients that would otherwise  lie out of reach of shallower bedding plants. […] We do not want a language as a list of basic commands and exchanges, we want to handle matter far more subtle.

When we say, ‘I haven’t got the words,’ the lack is not in the language nor in our emotional state, it is in the breakdown between the two. The poet heals that breakdown and not only for those who read poetry. If we want a living language, a language capable of expressing all that is called upon to express in a vastly changing world, then we need men and women whose whole self is bound up in that work with words. »

— Jeanette Winterson, “Writer, Reader, Words” in Art Objects