H.S.

I love languages, words, books, and all things to do with expressing emotions without speaking.

[luxatoid-deactivated20200723]

chipped

[abreathofatmosphere]

Man, this is such a perfect analogy. “Chipped”… Just damaged enough for it to show at times, but not nearly broken enough to warrant fixing. And so often does the chipped cup turn itself to show its undamaged side.

[arc-hammer]

someone put it in words

[urlocalfrogmammy]

i love this. this is a beautiful way of setting out how a lot of people feel

[fuckingconversations]

When I get a small scratch, I still clean and put a bandaid on it.

When my knee hurts I ice it. When I stub my toe I cradle it and make sure that pain is only a quick bruise that will heal rapidly, and not a break.

These are not life threatening things, not dangerous, nor even that painful in the grand scheme of things.

But if I am suffering, even the smallest amount, I seek to fix it.

If I know my friend is suffering, even the smallest amount, I want to know how I can help.

Some hurts CANNOT be fixed, but that is not the same as not even trying. That is not the same as seeing yourself as unworthy to be fixed, or not important enough.

If the smallest stubbed toe is worth care and attention, you, too, are worth love and healing when your heart is hurting. Especially when you’ve hurt for so long.

[mygothicheroine-deactivated2023]

the sheer level of galaxy brain jane austen was on when she wrote “if i loved you less i might be able to talk about it more”

[introvert-unicorn-deactivated20]

What you can say instead of the word beautiful:

lovely, 

charming, 

delightful, 

appealing, 

engaging, 

winsome

ravishing, 

gorgeous, 

heavenly, 

stunning, 

arresting, 

glamorous,

 irresistible, 

bewitching, 

beguiling

graceful, 

elegant,

 exquisite, 

aesthetic, 

artistic, 

decorative, 

magnificent

[knyghthode]

someone roadtrip w me and hit up museums and or historical sites

[dearherondale]

When Emily Brönte said "You said I killed you. Haunt me then."

and when M.L Rio said "Here's the thing about lust: you don't have to like each other. Ever heard of hate sex?"

and when Achilles said  “There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”

and when Oscar Wilde said "Everything in the world is about sex except sex.  Sex is about power."

and when Donna Tartt said "There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird was trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death."

?????????

Those are purely raw emotions.

Passion, love, panic, power and death are an insane combination.

[paper-fairy]

“People like me love only ghosts.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Franz Overbeck wr. c. October 1883

[ipoetried]

“Your mother rubbed alcohol on your skinned knees and told you, ‘it hurts because it is healing’. Now you are older and fall in love with people who are rubbing alcohol and your entire body is skinned knees and your mothers words play on repeat in your mind as you lay in bed alone and count the hours until you are supposed to wake up.”

— K.P.K 

[heavenlycreatures]

on soulmates

f. scott fitzgerald / friedrich nietzsche / florence and the machine / andrea dworkin / kiersten white / euripides / audre lorde / phillip pullmann / bob hicok

[heavenlycreatures]

on soulmates

f. scott fitzgerald / friedrich nietzsche / florence and the machine / andrea dworkin / kiersten white / euripides / audre lorde / phillip pullmann / bob hicok

[i-wrotethisforme]

Yes, I know today’s your birthday. and I’m going to know it’s your birthday every year for the rest of my life because some things I can’t erase. But that doesn’t mean you still have a place in my heart, because you don’t. And you don’t have a place in my mind either, unless I notice the date and it’s your birthday ,or I’m drunk in a bar and that song is playing, or your sister shows up on my Facebook newsfeed. So what I’m saying is at this point you’re just muscle memory and it has nothing to do with my heart.

[aletheiawriting]

why you should keep writing your story

because it’s a puzzle no one else will ever arrange the same way as you.

because there are ideas that simply won’t come to you until you write down the wrong words.

because all the bad scenes are the bones of the wonderful scenes.

because someone will love it: someone will read it once, and twice, and thrice; someone will ramble to you about the complexity of it; someone will doodle your characters out of love; someone will find it in exactly what they were looking for with or without knowing it.

because they have things to say, your characters. they’ve told you all those secrets and they have more to tell you, if you will listen.

because you love it even when you don’t; even when it drives you mad or when it accidentally turns into apathy; even when you think you’re doing it all wrong; you love it, and it loves you back.

because you can get a treasure even from things that go wrong; because if a story crumbles down you can build a shinier one on the same spot; because you won’t know where it will take you until it takes you there.

[pastelparrotlet]

I hope in 2020 you get to write that thing you’ve been wanting to write, and you write it amazingly.

[oldshrewsburyian]

book rec: period setting, creeping sense of dread, strong female protagonist.

Hmm, it would be helpful to know how much Victorian lit you’ve read, but here goes:

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë (so good. Also there are puppies.)

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (JANE! my gal! my free human being with an independent will! I love her so much.)

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James (”Is the Governess a Strong Female Character?” sounds like the topic of many bad undergraduate papers, but moving on…)

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (look, presuming the protagonists don’t sort themselves out into a blissful poly triad, I would like to date Marion. She is great.)

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (this book defies description, but it is a profound meditation on beauty and love and identity and fate.)

More recent works:

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (thanks to @theodoradove for reminding me of this, which I had inexcusably forgotten. Not written as having a period setting, but it would be to us now.)

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova (curses, vampires, European history, good creepy stuff like that, partially set in the 1970s)

Traveler of the Century, Andrés Neuman (smut! feminism! secrets that lurk around street corners! the eighteenth century!)

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay (girls’ boarding school in turn-of-the-century Australia, with forbidding landscape and strange goings-on)

Miss Timmins’ School for Girls, Nayana Currimbhoy (menaces, sundry, during monsoon season in India)

The Lake of Dead Languages, Carol Goodman (I remember really liking this, but I remember almost no details of it. It’s described as “gothic and elegant,” so there’s that.)

And for two books that hilariously upend the creeping sense of dread: Northanger Abbey (I hope Catherine is super-happy and raises children and puppies and a vegetable garden with the man she loves, while reading all the latest novels) and Cold Comfort Farm (there’s something nasty in the woodshed.)

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

every morning i wake up & get my coffee & i recite in my head this excerpt from ‘invitation,’ by mary oliver:  “it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.” & i just say it over & over again until it sticks to my mind for the rest of the day. it is a serious thing. i am alive. i am so lucky. this fresh morning i get the chance to live again & again & again

[sunken-standard]

For Writers:

Reblog if it’s okay for your followers to leave you an ask telling you what the one thing is they remember you for as a writer.  Is it a scene or a detail or a specific line? Is it something like style or characterization?  Is it that one weird kink they never thought they’d be into, but oh my god wow self-discovery time?

[bonjourthesi]

“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”

— The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (via bookaddict24-7)

[magnesiumflare]

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to to the person holding it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead - you first,” “I like your hat.”

- Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses"