EXSOMNAMBULO

Lamentations, victories, and beautiful flickers of life. ✞

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"Then you must weep for me, I told him, as Christ wept for mankind."

— Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

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"Without knowing it, he was in love with the earth. He had a feeling of support for her, even though he knew that in the end it would be this same earth's job to take him into her, to disintegrate and digest him."

– Shahrnush Parsipur, Touba and the Meaning of Night

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I yearn to tread the streets of Samarkand once more; to see the starry night sky above the mosques. The immaculate detail of each tile, each building. The godliness in its people. Singing and dancing. The colours, textures, and scents. I fell in love with Samarkand, and I pray that God will guide me there once more.

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"No time is like this one, the evening's final, silent hour. No sorrows burn any longer, no voices crowd any more."

— Karin Boye, "Evening Prayer" from Complete Poems

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"But to abandon you, said the other, would be to leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not know which part you are?"

— Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

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”Beauty was a tragic virtue often abused because we are fooled by it, but I emanated something darker, something uglier. Like a fraught hunger for life, like a voice that said I would do anything.”

Aria Aber, Good Girl

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Your love demands Nothing less than My wounded heart And my heart is filled With nothing but your longings.

— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi

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”I have resolved to apply myself to everything I do to make up for lost time.”

Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914–1920

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« J’ai passé comme une fleur ; j’ai séché comme l’herbe des champs. »

(“I bloomed and faded like a flower; I withered like the grass of the fields.”)

Detail from Chactas at the Tomb of Atala (1826), Louis Édouard Rioult.

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"This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.”

— Maggie Nelson, Bluets

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“I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem there is no perfect ending. Indeed, there are infinite endings. Or perhaps, once one begins, there are only endings.”

— Louise Glück, Faithful And Virtuous Night

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Rather special architecture at Strandvägen in Stockholm, Sweden.

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”She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded her up like death, discordant, without logical and beautiful conclusion.”

— Joy Harjo, “The Woman Hanging From The Thirteenth-Floor Window,” from Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

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"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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”And we go on, keep giving birth and watch ourselves die, over and over. And ground spinning beneath us goes on talking.”

— Joy Harjo, “For Alva Benson, And For Those Who Have Learned To Speak,” from Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

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“I could feel the anxious tremble in his voice—the tremble that made me think of a knife, the trembling that signaled to me that he did not know what was happening to me.”

— Aria Aber, Good Girl