Her body a chalice, a ciborium, a niche of shadows

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the vanquished

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All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

Kurt Vonnegut, from “Slaughterhouse-Five”

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It is so short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

Kurt Vonnegut, from “Slaughterhouse-Five”

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And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Kurt Vonnegut, from “Slaughterhouse-Five”

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"You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."

Kurt Vonnegut, from “Slaughterhouse-Five”

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A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognise as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me.

Julia Kristeva, trans. by Leon Roudiez, from “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”

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It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that "I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deports it to the father's account [verse au père — père-version]: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other.

Julia Kristeva, trans. by Leon Roudiez, from “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”

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When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object — that of being opposed to I.

Julia Kristeva, trans. by Leon Roudiez, from “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”

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Hi can u recommend some books that blew your mind with it's beautiful whimsical writings something like on your profile "her body a chalice.."

Yes! The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector comes to mind! Laure’s collected works as well

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The body suddenly seemed a tumor on the brain, a mere means of conveyance, a wagon; the mind’s go-cart now taken apart, laid in pieces on this table.

Lorrie Moore, from Birds of America: Stories: “Terrific Mother”

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That’s not it, [...] in this temporary dissolve, seeing death and birth, seeing the beginning and then the end, how they were the same quiet black, same nothing ever after: everyone’s life appeared in the world like a movie in a room. First dark, then light, then dark again. But it was all staggered, so that somewhere there was always light.

Lorrie Moore, from Birds of America: Stories: “Terrific Mother”

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Where was she? In her own head, like a dream; in the bellows of her lungs. What was she? Perhaps a child. Perhaps a corpse. Perhaps a fern in the forest in the storm; a singing bird.

Lorrie Moore, from Birds of America: Stories: “Terrific Mother”

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This now was how she would learn about the world, in sentences at meals; other people’s distillations amid her own vague pain, dumb with itself. This, for her, would be knowledge — a shifting to hear, an emptying of her arms, other people’s experiences walking through the bare rooms of her brain, looking for a place to sit.

Lorrie Moore, from Birds of America: Stories: “Terrific Mother”

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I must warn you, you must handle me delicately: I am covered with a mantle of iridescence as easily destroyed as a dust flower, and although I am quite willing to be arrested, if you handle me roughly you will lose much of the evidence. I don't want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colours created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce.

Anaïs Nin, from “A Spy in the House of Love”

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…a mandrake with fleshly roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple-bell-shaped corolla of narcotic flesh. How right he had been to paint her born with red-gold eyes always burning as from caverns, from behind trees, as one of the luxuriant women, a tropical growth, excommunicated from the bread line as too rich a substance for everyday living, placing her there merely as a denizen of the world of fire, and was content with her intermittent, parabolic appearances.

Anaïs Nin, from “A Spy in the House of Love”

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Someone hold me — hold me, so I will not continue to race from one love to another dispersing me, disrupting me…hold me to one…

Anaïs Nin, from “A Spy in the House of Love”

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I cannot bear the little loves, and yet I cannot claim all of yours, and every day I see you now, immense, complete, and I but a fragment, wandering…

Anaïs Nin, from “A Spy in the House of Love”