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Anne Sexton c.1965 reciting her poem “With Mercy for the Greedy,” (x)

But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.

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What magic denial / shall my life utter / to bring itself forth?

Denise Levertov, from Poems: 1960 - 1967; “Living Alone,”

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Enough, I’ve frozen in fear too long.

Anna Akhmatova, tr. by Judith Hemschemeyer, from Selected Poems; “Third and Last,”

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My terms amount to cultural heresy. I had to say: I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife. I had to learn strange and delicious lessons, lessons too few women learn: to love the thump of my steps, the implication of weight and presence and taking of space, to love my body’s rebellious hungers, responses to touch, to understand myself as more than a brain attached to a bundle of bones.

Marya Hornbacher, ‘Wasted’ (via sideeffectsinclude)

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I struggle against myself, I attack myself, I accuse myself, I defend myself.

Hélène Cixous, from an interview featured in the introduction of The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous (via violentwavesofemotion)

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My life / has appeared unclothed in court, / detail by detail, / death-bone witness by death-bone witness, / and I was shamed at the verdict…

Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems; “Talking to Sheep,”

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I ache, I never stop aching. Look at me. I wish I could step into your eyes. I wish you would close your eyes.

Hélène Cixous, from The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; “Portrait of Dora,”

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In the obscurity I am obscure.

Hélène Cixous, from The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; “Portrait of Dora,”

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I don’t think that I’ve ever been so tired of anything as I am of my face and myself.

Jean Seberg, from a letter to Rocoe Lee Browne, featured in “Jean Seberg – Breathless: A Biography,”

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Some days, some moments / Shiver in extreme fragility. / As if the world were a thought / God was thinking and then / not thinking.

Denise Levertov, from Poems: 1960 - 1967; “Sands of the Well; “The Danger Moments,”

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I see nothing. I do not move. It is an empty time, animal time, vigilant, I am submerged, under the earth and under time. I listen. Perhaps the waiting is a form of prayer.

Hélène Cixous, from an interview featured in the introduction of The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous

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– and I shall think of you / Whenever I am most happy, whenever I am / Most sad, whenever I see a beautiful thing. You are a burning lamp to me, a flame / The wind cannot blow out, and I shall hold you / High in my hand against whatever darkness.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Three Plays; “The Lamp and the Bell,”

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…the proof of love is grief, and grief is never enough…

Hayden Carruth, from Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995; “Sin,”

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They have compared her to water–and water, indeed, she was. Water that run through my fingers when I was athirst. I knew there was something obscure–subterranean–cool–from which she drew her persistence, when by all rights of what I felt to be nature, she should have dried–as fields in a rainless summer, she should have dried, this seemingly loveless woman and yet she didn’t. Yes, she was cool, she was water, but water sealed under the rock–where I was concerned. I burned. I burned. I burned…

Tennessee Williams, from The Theatre of Tennessee Williams; “The Purification,”

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I have never seen or heard your name without a shiver, half of delight, half of anxiety.

Edgar Allan Poe, from a letter to Helen Whitman featured in The last letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman

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But I know I live half alive in the world, / Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

Galway Kinnell, from A New Selected Poems; “Middle of the Way,”

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All my life I have been in love with the sun. I looked at it as the great lover, the great seizure. Somehow, letting the sun wash over you, letting its heat adore you, was like having intercourse with God. And now…just a spot of sun on my arm as I drive along and it is like bees stinging me.

Anne Sexton, from a letter to Anne Wilder, featured in “Anne Sexton: A Biography,” written by Diane Wood Middlebrook