FFS.

Bisous Chaton x

[wildeastra]

it’s always, “hi, how are you?” and never, “you have bewitched me, body and soul, and i love, i love, i love you. and wish from this day forth never to be parted from you” ... how unfair

[sunsetquotes]

“For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth.”

— Zoe Skylar

[saintketamine]

tumblr is a MORNING app. it should be enjoyed while eating breakfast, drinking your cup of tea or coffee, letting your meds kick in... sometimes I go on here at night but in my heart I know it’s wrong.

[ffspoetry]

As much as love is beautiful, why haven’t there been great sonnets in where one’s home has been found?

[ffspoetry]

the most privileged in this world are those who hold passion and do not let it leave their sight 

- i want to find something that burns my soul, consuming me entirely, leaving me raw

[luthienne]

hi. i saw you made a compilation of quotes for another person and i was wondering if u would do one for me? don’t feel like u have to i am just curious and love compilations w all my heart.

i am a stuck between wanting to stay and wanting to move on and i don’t know what to do.

aww mi amor ❀ here is a compilation on that feeling of not knowing to what do and just getting kind of stuck. and here are a few more for you:

“She had decided to stay. She had decided to go. In her sleep she had decided a thousand times. Her dreams were split in half.”

Catherynne M. Valente, from Deathless

Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

Anna Kamienska, from A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

“...and I wanted, in a messy, maddening way, to go on forgetting myself and yet, to find myself too.”

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“The fact that I lack words here: doesn’t this mean that I am losing myself? How quickly does lack of speech turn into lack of identity?”

Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (tr. Jan van Heurck)

Clarice Lispector, “Excerpt”, Collected Stories (trans. Katrina Dodson)

“You were drowning, it seemed, in air.”

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”

Mary Oliver, from “Starlings in Winter”

Pierre Boncompain, La Somnolence

Yiyun Li, “Two Lives”

“We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel.”

Catherynne M. Valente, from Deathless

“I say something to God, but he’s not a living thing, / so I say it to the river, I say, / I want to walk through this doorway / but without all those ghosts on the edge, I want them to stay here. / I want them to go on without me. / I want them to burn in the water.”

Ada Limón, Sharks in the Rivers

Holly Warburton - Spirit Hold, Part Two, 2019, Drawings: Digital Arts

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

[luthienne]

Hi ! I was wondering if you had quotes / thoughts about feeling lost in life, when nothing feels right and choices have to be made even though they all feel like lukewarm water when you wanted a hot bath. That feeling of losing a sense of grounding and not seeing the direction in which to move. thank you xx

(I’ve been wanting to compile this from the moment I received your ask in my inbox. I know the feeling intimately, and I love the way you articulated it. Hope any of these quotes resonate w what you were looking for xx)

“What shall we do my darling, when trial grows more, and more, when the dim, lone light expires, and it’s dark, so very dark, and we wander, and know not where, and cannot get out of the forest…”

—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.”

—Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (tr. Benjamin Moser)

“But as it is / I lack myself.”

—Anne Carson, Grief Lessons; “Herakles”

“Even now I can’t explain. Something happened, a kind of earthquake that shook everything and I lost faith and touch with everybody.”

—Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield

“She felt suddenly as if she were a ghost in her own life—”

—Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden

“I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half of my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can’t stop it, but I know I’m not really going to be hurt and yet time is so long and even a second goes on and on and I could stand any of it if I could only surrender—”

—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“It makes me tremble. (…) To think back. I remember exactly how I thought life would be.”

—Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband

Emily Dickinson, “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”

“and I didn’t care / and I was alone / and there had been war / and that thing (my soul) / was a lost star / or a lost boat / adrift,”

—H.D., Child Poems: “Dedication” 

“She had a perpetual sense (…), of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 

“You know the feeling? One lies in a kind of daze, feeling so sensitive—so unbearably sensitive to the exterior world and longing for something ‘lovely’ to happen.”

—Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield

“I don’t care a bit—about anything—I just seem to be asleep and can’t wake up—”

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Art and Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe

“Life is what happens to someone else; / I stand on the sidelines and wring my hands.”

—Lisel Mueller, Waving from Shore

“…it is a little thing to say how lone it is — anyone can do it, but to wear loneliness next to your heart for weeks, when you sleep, and when you wake, ever missing something, this, all cannot say, and it baffles me.”

—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“My life now is a dream too, semi-detached, and seems to happen to somebody else.”

—Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters

“I don’t know—I don’t know anything. There is no one here I can talk to—it’s all like a bad dream.”

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Art and Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe

“…she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to not be abandoned.”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I had lost my true rhythm. But what was my true rhythm?”

—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol 1, 1931-1934 

“People kept saying It’s only a matter of time so I persevered in the hope they weren’t lying. At the same time beginning to think I might’ve been lying to myself. Wasting everyone’s time with fantasies of this career I couldn’t have. The person I could never be. There was just so much rejection and not enough of me. I got so afraid. And I lost my nerve—”

—Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians

—Denise Levertov, Life in the Forest; “A Daughter (I)”

“I’m not lost. Or not lost much. Lonely. It is that and … I don’t know what to do. So I move. And cars move. And it’s almost life.”

—Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians 

“What prevents you? The future. The future tense, / immense as outer space. / You could get lost there. / No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density / and drowned events pressing you down, / like sea water—”

—Margaret Atwood, “Up”

“What is there to say? I became physically ill. It was as if I had fallen into space and hung there while life passed me by.”

—Boris Pasternak, Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke

“And nothing else happens. The days go by, lost, wasted, and I have no drive to write, no words come… And I grow more and more solitary.”

—Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“I cannot write anymore, dears. Though it is many nights, my mind never comes home.”

—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ has started invading me like ivy on a wall.”

—Clarice Lispector, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector 

“There’s a loss of personality. / Or rather, you’ve lost touch with the person / You thought you were. / You no longer feel quite human.”

—T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“My wings are cut and I can-not fly I can-not fly I can-not fly.”

—Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield

“Me, as ever, gone.”

—Anne Carson, Decreation; “Despite her Pain, Another Day”

“…and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

—Emily Dickinson, Letters

“…why this doubt that I have about everything I do, this void that frightens me, all these lost illusions?”

—Gustave Flaubert, Intimate Notebook 1840-1841

“What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is quietly killing me. Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.”

—Jeanette Winterson, “The Green Man” 

“Around. Around. There / should have been / a lesson somewhere.”

—Louise Glück, “The Game”

“Only occasionally do I find I have to break my peace: shout or be lost in the shuffle. But mostly I am lost in the shuffle.”

—Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. I recognize how that she was feeling then as I feel now. Invisible on the street.”

—Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown;”

—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

“You might not remember me, dears. I cannot recall myself. I thought I was strongly built, but this stronger has undermined me.”

—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“I have no world to go back into, or to go forward into. Because these years have cut me away from many things – from everything: not only materially, but also mentally, spiritually.”

—Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

—Rita Dove, “The Venus of Willendorf”

“…for we are in such fragile skin, so close to getting lost in the in-between.”

—Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians

“I do not want revenge, I do not want expiation. / I only want to ask someone / how I was lost, / how I was lost,”

—Margaret Atwood, “Owl Song”

“I felt as if the sky was torn off my life. I had no home in goodness anymore.”

—Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

“Let it be over, she pleaded within herself. Let it never have happened—any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting.”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“The ultimate fantasy: the recovery of an irrecoverable past. But if I could daydream about an invented happy future…”

—Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

“Tell me what’s the difference / between hope and waiting / because my heart doesn’t know / It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting / It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope”

—Anna Kamienska, Astonishments

—Denise Levertov, To Stay Alive

“I long to—ah, so much!! If that were possible I’d get back to my spirit.”

—Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters

“I told my Soul to sing— / She said her Strings were snapt—”

—Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems; “The first Day’s Night had come,”

“Surely it is a privilege to approach the end / still believing in something.”

—Louise Glück, Averno; “October”

“There is a wild raging river flowing inside of me. I can’t dam it. I’m hurt so badly. Believe me—oh shit! Believe, believe—what’s there to believe anymore?”

— Henry Miller, A Literate Passion

“And life tasteless. And so eager, so eager that I should accomplish a miracle. People always expect miracles.”

—Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion

“I want to be filled with longing again / till dark burn marks show on my skin. I want to be written again / in the Book of Life, to be written every single day / till the writing hand hurts.”

—Yehuda Amichai,“I Walked Past a House Where I Lived Once,”

“I want / my heart back / I want to feel everything again—”

—Louise Glück, Averno; “Blue Rotunda”

[ffspoetry]

I gave so much of myself that when he finally gave some of him, it didn’t fully cover the cracks

[somewhatsomelikepoetry]

After you left I had to relearn how to be alone

I had to learn how to fall asleep

Without the sound of your voice and the touch of a familiar hand

I had to learn to cook for myself and that it’s okay to eat even if you’re alone

I had to learn how to be by myself because I was never alone when I had you

I miss you

[fuchsiamae]

an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks

the scarlet ibis

marigolds

the diamond necklace

the monkey’s paw

the open boat

the lady and the tiger

the minister’s black veil

an occurrence at owl creek bridge

a rose for emily

(I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)

the cask of amontillado

the yellow wallpaper

the most dangerous game

a good man is hard to find

some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15

add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed

[repulsion-gel]

The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gift of the Magi, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County, Thank You Ma'am

[allyitis]

the box social by james reaney. i remember we all had to silently read it in class, and you would hear the moment everyone reached the Part because some people would audibly go “what”

[fuchsiamae]

wHat did I just put my eyes on

[schrodingers-rufus]

“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

Not quite a short story, but read in class: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from The Twilight Zone

[w3rewolf-th3rewolf]

Harrison Bergeron, Cat and the Coffee Drinkers

[rebel-against-reality]

“Where are you going and where have you been” by Joyce carol oates

[actuallyapathy]

“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury

[asexualzoro]

the lottery by shirley jackson

[eccentwrit]

i can’t believe Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” wasn’t already mentioned and also it’s not so much unsettling as more absurdist but “The Leader” by Eugene Ionesco definitely made me go wtf

[idlewildly]

Ett halvt ark papper. I cried so much.

[bravinto]

Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов

[siderealsandman]

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

[insanitysbloomings]

I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

[felderwin]

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury 

[was-once-somewhere-else]

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, by Donald Barthelme

[jeaniefranklins]

I read Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day” in seventh grade (it wasn’t assigned, I was just going through my textbook for new stuff to read) and as a bullied kid with SAD, it Fucked Me Up.

[sanguinarysanguinity]

An Ordinary Day with Peanuts, by Shirley Jackson

[real-faker]

Eh, this was more like community college, but The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

[scarlettaagni]

Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl

and this story that I can’t remember the name of and can’t find, though it might be by O. Henry? it’s about a bunch of demons who want to stop Santa Claus from going through with Christmas, and he must travel through the mountains they inhabit to escape their vices? (good christ I can’t remember the name for the life of me)

[ghostloner]

Ok but the laughing man and a good day for bananafish but j.d. Salinger

[nitrosplicer]

The City (195) Ray Bradbury. An intense commentary on colonialism and space exploration. I read it for a sci fi survey class.

Another short story I read in that sci fi class was Vaster than Empires and More Slow (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin. A commentary on humanity and how human we believe ourselves to be. Also, an interesting commentary on mental health.

In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom, written in 1947 by Ango Sakaguchi. It made my skin crawl the first time I read it.

Also going to recommend For A Breath I Tarry by Roger Zelazny, a commentary on whether AI can become human in a future without humans: http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/ZELQZNY/forbreat.txt

[cryingalonewithfrankenstein]

whoever posted “The Laughing Man” and “A Good Day For Bananafish” is Correct

[fluffmugger]

the scarlet ibis

marigolds

the diamond necklace

the monkey’s paw

the open boat

the lady and the tiger (I assume you meant Stockton’s The lady or the  tiger?)

the minister’s black veil

an occurrence at owl creek bridge

a rose for emily

the cask of amontillado

the yellow wallpaper

the most dangerous game

a good man is hard to find

The Tell-Tale Heart

 The Gift of the Magi

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County

 Thank You Ma'am

The box social 

The Veldt

The Monsters are Due on Maple Street

Harrison Bergeron

Cat and the Coffee Drinkers

Where are you going and where have you been

The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury

The lottery by shirley jackson

The Landlady

The Leader

Ett halvt ark papper.

Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов

A Sound of Thunder 

I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream 

All Summer in a Day 

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

An Ordinary Day with Peanuts

The Star 

Lamb to the Slaughter

The laughing man 

A perfect day for bananafish

The City (link goes to compendium of short stories)

Vaster than Empires and More Slow (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin.

In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom 

For A Breath I Tarry 

[the-prince-of-tides]

All of Flannery O'Connor’s shorts.

[thecaffeinebookwarrior-deactiva]

I didn’t read it in a text book, but “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” haunted me for life.

[accidental-muse]

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” feels like some liminal space I once visited, whenever I remember reading it.

[ffspoetry]

I have subcutaneous lumps tossed on my face; I no longer hope for beauty I don't have

[ffspoetry]

I can't ignore beauty especially when there is a lack in mine.

[rosewhiteboyhood-deactivated202]

when oscar wilde said “to define is to limit” and when walt whitman said “i contradict myself, i am large, i contain multitudes.”

[ffspoetry]

Beauty is bought by the beholder

[ffspoetry]

[ffspoetry]

I love you  But not enough  to please me For you deserve someone  Who will give you Their time Their body  Their Soul  and not just second-hand fragments ps. you are to beautiful to be second

ffs. 

[badwritingsfrommetoyou]

“Are You A Feminist?” I am five years old. My mother just told me to go fetch a sweater because an adult man would be coming over soon, and I need to cover up. I am seven years old. A boy wouldn’t stop chasing me on the playground and throwing rocks at me. I’m upset. My best friend says it’s because he likes me and she told me boys are mean to girls they like. I am ten years old. We just had our first health class in school. The teachers were trying to educate us on sexual assault. After class, my friends told me to scream fire instead of rape if I’m ever being attacked, because no one will come if they hear the word rape being screamed. I am twelve years old. I just got my first period. A pad fell out of my book bag at school and everyone started laughing. Apparently, periods aren’t normal and they should be hidden at all costs. I am fifteen years old. I’m in the office crying because a boy I don’t know kept following me down the hallway and grabbing my ass even after I told him to stop. The administrator scolds me. “maybe you shouldn’t be wearing leggings if you don’t want that kind of attention” she sends me home with a dress code violation. She marked the “distracting” box. I am seventeen years old. I’ve just been slapped because a boy got angry with me after I wouldn’t let him put his hands down my pants. Apparently, I led him on by letting him copy my math assignment. I am twenty-one years old. My best friend has bought me special nail polish to wear to the bar. She says it changes color if it’s dipped in a drink that has a date rape drug in it. I am twenty-three years old. I’m reading this to the first class I will ever teach. A student raises her hand and says, “no offense, but doesn’t this stuff happen to every girl?” So yes, I am a feminist. And when you ask me why, I will read this to you. Again, and again, and again.

v.j.v (via badwritingsfrommetoyou)