Recovering English Major

[allthingshaveanend]

T.H. White, The Once and Future King (1958)

[wingsandshadow]

“Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” - Walt Whitman

[cosmonautroger]

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five (1969)

[bitterbloodrose]

soulmates

emily brontë, wuthering heights // nfwmb, hozier // madeline miller, the song of achilles // rumi // louis tomlinson, habit // plato, the symposium // sarah perry, the essex serpent // sleeping at last, turning page // leo tolstoy, anna karenina // percy shelley, prometheus unbound

[rainreads-deactivated20250201]

Auguries of Innocence, William Blake.

[deviika]

Fernando Pessoa // Franz Kafka

[athenasdumbchild]

I often find myself thinking about When Gillian Flynn wrote, 'Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs.' and and when ocean voung wrote, ' a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once." And when Gillian Flynn wrote, ' I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.' and when Richard silken wrote, 'Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.' and when Sylvia Plath wrote, 'i am terrified of this dark thing that sleeps In me' and when Alex michaelides wrote, The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.'

[rini-descartes]

When Richard Siken said "If you love me, you don't love me in a way I understand"

[literature-cult]

“Never regret thy fall,

O Icarus of the fearless flight

For the greatest tragedy of them all

Is never to feel the burning light.”

-Oscar Wilde

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“- There is a beautiful moon tonight. - Let us go and look at it.”

— Oscar Wilde, from The Plays of Oscar Wilde; “A Woman of No Importance,”

[academiaa-a]

When Voltaire said "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"

[philosophybits]

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

— George Eliot, Adam Bede

[macrolit]

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

—

1984,

George Orwell (b. 25 June 1903)

[weltenwellen]

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

[macrolit]

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

— Salman Rushdie (b. 19 June 1947)

[macrolit]

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away fifteen paperback classics featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Agatha Christie, J.D. Salinger, Daphne du Maurier, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others! Won’t this collection look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on July 12, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck! Follow macrolit.books to qualify for our ig giveway. 📚

[soracities]

literary snippets over which i am losing my mind this week:

“(we are not single; we are one)” (virginia woolf)

“why was she dancing? no reason. just alive, I guess” (george saunders)

“touch me this time / let me love what I cannot know” (w.s. merwin)

“and when I found you laughing under trees, / The quail began to trill and flute away, / As far away as hands that reach for hands; / But, when it sang, you kissed me out of sound.” (james wright) 

“what on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?” (tennessee williams)

“come back! even as a shadow, even as a dream!” (euripides)

“with every word I write I remember the void that makes me write what I couldn’t if I let you in.” (alejandra pizarnik)

“I am dying alone /  don’t wake me… / kiss me once again… / and sleep...” (saadi youssef)

“and the nights were as dark as my baby / half as beautiful too” (hozier)