Bad Poetess

About literature, stories, and words that form them. This is my happy place.

[bibliolectors]

Tarde lectora en el árbol (ilustración de Andreea Dumuta)

[twospringflowers]

[narcolepticdrugs]

"We read to know we're not alone."

- William Nicholson, Shadowlands

[flores-et-dracones]

Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey

[bad-poetess]

“’I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

[voirlvmer]

“Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed.”

— K-Ming Chang, from “Churching”

[theclassicsreader]

“Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

[bad-poetess]

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

[primulaceas]

Eileen Myles, "Whax ‘n Wayne" from I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975 - 2014

[macrolit]

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.”

—

James Baldwin

[luthienne]

“It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you —”

— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

[antigonick]

“—the Sun leapt up into the sky of bronze—”

— Homer, excerpt of “Book III”, The Odyssey, trans. by Emily Wilson

[luthienne]

Camille Rankine, “Emergency Management”

[primulaceas]

Gabriela Mistral, from a letter to Doris Dana c. January 1950 (translated by Velma García-Gorena)

[antigonies]

sometimes poetry is the only refuge

[luthienne]

“Telling stories doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives. But perhaps it is a way of understanding the unthinkable. If a story haunts us, we keep telling it to ourselves, replaying it in silence while we shower, while we walk down streets, or in our moments of insomnia.”

— Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

[bad-poetess]

Adams briefly living his Kafkaesque writer dreams when describing Arthur's trip to the local planning office.