Between sleep and awake

Sharp as the stars

[dappermouth]

And then you had that dream again.

[seraphinesaintclair]

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Beyond.”

[derangedrhythms]

I closed my eyes, just listening to that voice I missed so much. It was like lonely waves against the shore.

Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen, tr. Megan Backus

[robert-hadley]

Photo - Matt Oliver

[hungrycelestial]

She stared at the fire, thinking of how many people that must be, all of them real, and how she would never be able to hold them all in her head or mourn for each of them. She hoped that there had been someone to mourn properly for them. She did not think she could take on another task and hope to see it done.

— T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge

[louisegluck]

Ada Limón, from “Lashed to the Helm, All Stiff and Stark.” [ID in alt text]

[dk-thrive]

The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too debilitating for us to suffer new bondages, new captivities from those whom we love. This is how I am your friend: I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure, in a word - and I would like to be, for you, a companion you can be sure of, always.”

— Albert Camus, (to René Char, 1957) in "Camus-Char: Correspondence 1946-1959) (Gallimard, 2007) (via Alive on All Channels)

[woundgallery]

Louise Bourgeois, Touching Christ

[curiousmiscellanies-blog]

August Natterer, My eyes at the moment of the apparitions, 1911-1913

[eyesleepers]

[neoyorzapoteca]

Robert Bresson

[dk-thrive]

That age-old thing about how grief and sadness turn people on. What was happening between us here wasn't strange — it was part of the human condition.

— Kate Fagan, The Three Lives of Cate Kay (Atria Books, January 7, 2025)

[weltenwellen]

“It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn’t know you wanted.”

— Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

[weltenwellen]

Mary Oliver, from “Summer Morning”, Red Bird

[dk-thrive]

There's depth in not decisively agreeing.

— Izumi Suzuki, "Set My Heart on Fire". Translated by Helen O'Horan. (Verso Fiction, November 12, 2024)

[enchantedbook]

Art by Jean Michel Coriou.

[enchantedbook]

Dragon by Holly Lucero

[aziakeys]

What I want from next year, what I need, is almost just silence, more solitude, like four years ago. This has to go back to the way it was, it has to be. As for the rest, today when I look back I only see the experience that 1900 brought me, Russia. And all the scattered memories merge into a single feeling, like something vast, silvery, sublime, without weight or melancholy, similar to a limitless dedication. Something like the little huts nestled on the banks of the Volga, somewhere in the infinite expanse between North and South — Beethoven and folk songs. And, for many years, wherever I find myself, on the edge of whatever evolution, in any sense I will continue to walk along the banks of that river, as if towards a homeland.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russia with Rilke