[macrolit]

“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”

— Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

“(…) became more God-haunted”

— Ladies Almanack, Djuna Barnes

[roadmotel]

Yves Olade, Trauma Guide to Gunshot Wounds

[theninthmember]

fave stardew valley moment of all time was when I was talking to evelyn and she was like “i love living by the ocean… as a child I used to collect seashells all day…” and then I handed her a shell and she said “it smells terrible :/“ and I lost a heart.

[am1na]

Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

[mashamorevna]

“I would give you back to yourself if I could–”

— Julianna Baggott, from “For Sylvia, Come Winter. Come, Winter,” featured in “When She Named Fire: An Anthology,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[filmnoirsbian]

A conversation w/ a snared fox at the edge of the field

[fjordblades]

“Not every girl survives the forest. / Sometimes she becomes it.”

— Catherine Garbinsky, from “The Princess & the Thorns,” Even Curses End (via lifeinpoetry)

[inkflowsnetwork]

“o Calm, one day You shall come to us again, clean and robed in white, with the clouds unto You and the angels hymning might; but for now You are little, and You are but flesh, no Son of Man, no Prince of Peace. yes: You are little, and I see in Your eyes a want as that of any child — to be held against Your mother’s weeping breast, to have Her sweet voice sing You sooth, lull You to sleep. o: She is as honey, don’t You think? — in every fold fresh, in every seam as God’s church. You will love Her well: among Your sorrows She will be the wild rose, pure of thorn, purer of fume. yet it is long before this shall come to pass: for now, it is You and Her and the man called Yosef, the man with rough palms at whose long whiskers You will learn to pull with great delight; he will not mind. as You grow, he will teach You how to work the wood, because the hands of a Saviour are hands meant to mend, to build. he, too, will be dear to You: at his death You will call onto the angels of the wilderness to bring forth spikenard and myrrh, and You will bar rot from his body, and You will comb his white hair: this shall pass sooner than the other griefs, but for now it is still only you and the babes of the goats; and it is warm in the stable, and the night is as a bed of bliss: Yosef is humming an old song because in Her love Mariam can do naught but roam Her eyes over the ark of your flesh, so dear and so wondrous and so much like Hers.”

—   nativity scenee   december 25th, 2019  / /  lianna schreiber (via ragewrites)

[pushkins]

the taste of his power is rotten; apples left to fester beneath an autumn sky. huaisang knows because he can imagine being on the other side of it – emotions like an ensnared animal, never knowing the hunter that awaits at the end of the trail. that is how trust becomes, to nie huaisang, a commodity to barter with. he has it in spades, from everyone around him. other powers vanish when the wielder leaves, dies, vanishes – but not huaisang’s power, oh no. his ability is a festering wound that goes both ways, until it consumes huaisang’s own trust and leaves a vacancy for disdain.

trust given without being earned loses meaning; the taste of his power is rotten. he tastes it in the smiles of his lovers and the glances of his brother, in the teachers who congratulate his paintings, and the friends who invite him to party after party.

but nie huaisang isn’t truly bitter, not until the day jiang cheng forgets to frown and instead smiles at him, frail trust held out in the way he reached for huaisang’s cheek. and here is all huaisang has ever wanted – a calloused finger tracing his parted lips – only to have it be a farce.

inspired by @someone-save-meeee superpowers au 

[xenopenthos]

“You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame: you made the hornèd god your own: You stood behind him on his throne: you called him by his secret name.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx

[lonelyjapan]

“沢山の人間が居て 俺はその中の一人 定まらぬ視線の中で みんなお互い窒息寸前”

— There are so many people And I’m just one of them We’re all about to suffocate In each other’s shifty eyes (via exo-like-perfection)

[lannisten]

““People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.””

— Thich Nhat Hanh (via quotestuff)

[fyeahmyths]

“pure, they say, as golden blood flows from alabaster wrists pure, they dream, as sullied feathers fall from broken wings pure, they remember, as tarnished crowns crumble from atop dirty curls pure, they curse, as darkened eyes glare at faultless brethren.”

— pure: a study in fallen angels (via milkblushes)

[soracities]

“and your shadow is not your shadow but your reflection,”

— margaret atwood, ‘night poem’ (via wishbzne)

[xshayarsha]

What ate your favourite dark quotes?

“In the shivery depths I saw a great heart bright as a ruby suspended in the vault by a huge web. It was beating and with each beat there fell to the ground a huge gout of blood. It was too large to be the heart of any living creature. It was larger even than the heart of a god. It is like the heart of agony”. — Henry Miller, from The Colossus of Maroussi. 

“Longs flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift and blow away on the wind, leaving an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle calling mutely through lipless mouth.” — Anne Carson, from The Glass Essay.

“All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; but nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing”. — Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; The Lady of the House of Love.

“It wants our bodies, the landscape does, and everyone runs the risk of being swallowed up. Can we love nature for what it really is: predatory? We do not walk through a passive landscape”. — Richard Siken, from War of The Foxes; Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede.

“With an old red hook in her mouth, the mouth that kept bleeding, into the terrible fields of her soul…” — Anne Sexton, from Live or Die; Consorting with Angels.

“Red, red, mother, you are blood red” .— Anne Sexton, from The Book of Folly; The Death of Fathers.

“I have (…) a seeing that floats within my bones”. — Alice Notley, from Mysteries of Small Houses; 47th Birthday.

“This is the place you would rather not know about, this is the place that will inhabit you, this is the place you cannot imagine, this is the place that will finally defeat you”. – Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written.

“Moon snakes, tongues of the dark speak like bones unlocking, leaves falling of a future you won’t believe in”. — Margaret Atwood, from You Are Happy; The Circe/Mud Poems.

“I know a she who is terrified by butterflies as if they were supernatural. And the divine part of butterflies is terrifying indeed. And I know a he who shivers in horror before flowers – he thinks that flowers are hauntingly delicate like a sigh of nobody in the dark”.— Clarice Lispector, from Água Viva.

“Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.” — C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy.

“Revel in the open country of my wound, break apart its reeds and delicate rivulets”. — Federico García Lorca, [trans. Paul Archer] from Sonnets of Dark Love; Sonnet of the garland of roses.

“Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell – a smell of dying moons and shadows”. — Zelda Fitzgerald, from a letter to Francis Scott Fitzgerald, circa April 15th 1919.

“I am terrified by this dark thing  that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity”.— Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems; Elm.

“The great roots of night grow suddenly from your soul, and the things that hide in you come out again”. — Pablo Neruda, from The Light Wraps You.

“The heart threading a tunnel, a dark, dark tunnel: like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart or collapsing inwards from skin to soul”. — Pablo Neruda, from Death Alone.

“Your life is a painting in a dark museum and sometimes you examine it closely”. — Guillaume Apollinaire, from Zone.

“To what extent we need death—that’s something that can’t be spoken of. How we call on it with our terrified prayers, how we beseech it not to come, with what horror we adore it—no, that can’t be spoken of. We aren’t happy unless it’s lying across our path”.— Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata; Hiss of the Axe.

“On his way the gallow birds asked for food so he killed his horse to give them lunch. They sucked the blood up like whiskey and covered him with promises”. — Anne Sexton, from Transformations; The White Snake.

“All peoples are driven to the point of eating their gods after a time: it’s the old greed for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness, the lust to feel what it does to you when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh, when you swallow it down and you can see with its own cold eyes, look out through murder”.— Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II; Eating Snake.

“Now you are at the place of annihilation. Now you are at the place of annihilation. She turns her head away from the blue beams of his eyes; she knows no other consummation than the only one she can offer him. She has not eaten for three days. It is dinner-time. It is bedtime.” — Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; The Lady of the House of Love.

[bnmxfld]

“We’ll survive, you and I.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald (via bnmxfld)