Beneath the Surface

"...and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs." - Virginia Woolf.

[mournfulroses]

Georgia O’Keeffe, from a letter to Alfred Stieglitz featured in My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933

[takeustogloryarchive-deactivate]

[mournfulroses]

A universe that includes you can't be all bad,

Margaret Atwood, from a poem titled "Postcard," featured in Selected Poems

[mournfulroses]

This great terrible silence was my love.

Robert Desnos, from Essential Poems & Writings; "Ebony Life,"

[philosophybits]

“A man is so prone to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared to distort the truth on purpose, prepared to deny the visible and the audible just so he can justify his own logic.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

[weltenwellen]

Mary Oliver, from “There you were, and it was like spring”, Red Bird

[violentwavesofemotion]

“The night isn’t dark; the world is dark. Stay with me a little longer.”

— Louise Glück, from “Departure” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[woolfdaily]

“I could only think of you as being very distant and beautiful and calm. A lighthouse in clean waters.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West c. January 1927

[booksqouted]

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle-age.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

[philosophybits]

“The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[lifeinpoetry]

My partner tells me about their day, every day. And every day I watch their skin drink the sun’s light with an unabashed thirst for our life together. I wish the whole

world could see the light as it floats through our single-pane windows—could see this particular yellow, or touch the dust hung in time like a perfect sequined skirt. Such simple beauty. We want to share.

— Kayleb Rae Candrilli, from “Transgender heroic: all this ridiculous flesh,” Water I Won’t Touch

[heartshop]

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[flowerytale]

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Mary Bowles (about December 1858)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“This is how we heal. I will kiss you like forgiveness. You will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms will bandage and we will press promises between us like flowers in a book. I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat on your skin. I will write novels to the scar on your nose. I will write a dictionary of all the words I have used trying to describe the way it feels to have finally, finally found you.”

— Clementine von Radics, from “Mouthful of Forevers”, Mouthful of Forevers (Andrew McMeel, 2015)

[xshayarsha]

“I was full of letters I hadn’t sent you,”

— Anne Sexton, from All My Pretty Ones; Flight.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

[luthienne]

“I have always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I have worked hard at being the hero of my own life, but every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn’t know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.”

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