P O É S I E

[oyeevarnika]

you’re the loss of my life” cinematic universe

[lorde-daily]

Lorde & Charli xcx @ Charli’s 32nd birthday party.

[corporaloretsev]

How do you know each other? We lived next door in halls. Ah, yeah, where the magic happens.

[corporaloretsev]

Normal People (2020) One Day (2024)

[f-olklore]

[fuckingateau]

[seaoflove]

holy trinity:

so let me stay tender-hearted, despite despite despite – chen chen, from this tweet

with the heart beating quickly in fear and ecstasy, and a hope, a hope, a hope – czeslaw milosz, new and collected poems: 1931-2001

i took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. i am, i am, i am – sylvia plath, the bell jar

[animebw]

Short Reflection: Children of the Sea

The best word I can think of to describe Children of the Sea is “overwhelming.” It’s not so much a movie as it is a whirlwind of sensory experiences, music and sound and color and light clashing and colliding like the tumultuous waves of a stormy sea. It’s a cascading tsumani of pure artistry painted on a stunning canvas that builds and builds and builds until whatever grip of reality you might have once had is shattered and you’re swept away by the sheer explosive wonder of it all. It’s perhaps a more purely “cinematic” experience than any film I’ve watched in a very long time. Certainly, it’s one of the single most gorgeous pieces of animation I’ve ever watched, period. And if you’re at all interested in checking it out- which I think you should- the best piece of advice I can give you is this: don’t bother trying to understand Children of the Sea. Just feel it. Experience it. Let it flow over you and around our and through you and fill every pocket of your mind and soul with its presence. I promise you, you’ll be better off for it.

Continuar lendo

[jazbaaati]

Flowers in Virginia Woolf’s works.

Came across such an interesting essay in Virginia Woolf & The Natural World called:

Which basically traces the recurrent theme of flowers in Woolf’s work and analyses their meaning in each of her novels. There’s also a few bar-charts which are so delightful.

[weltenwellen]

Frank O'Hara, from “Mayakovsky”, Selected Poems

[the2headedcalf-moved]

mini list of poems i rediscovered today while scrolling through my blog

the embrace by mark doty

yes, think by ruth stone

the patience of ordinary things by pat schneider

party by kim addonizio

perhaps the world ends here by joy harjo

like a small cafe, that's love by mahmoud darwish

what they did yesterday afternoon by warsan shire

munich, winter 1973 (for y.s.) by james baldwin

[cchilyoja]

                                 BOOK QUOTES FROM wuthering heights 

“He’s/She’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his/her and mine are the same.”

“If all else perished, and he/she remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he/she were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”

“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”

“If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.”

“You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth.“

“I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

“Terror made me cruel …”

“She burned too bright for this world.”

“He’s/She’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

“I have to remind myself to breathe – almost to remind my heart to beat!”

“It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,’ he answered. ‘Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?”

“May she wake in torment!“

“Honest people don’t hide their deeds.”

“I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.”

“You know that I could as soon forget you as my existence!”

“Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.”

“It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.”

“Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it.“

“How cruel, your veins are full of ice-water and mine are boiling.”

“Existence, after losing her, would be hell”

“She was a wild, wicked slip of a girl. She burned too brightly for this world.”

“Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous”

“They forgot everything the minute they were together again.”

“It’s no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing,’

[saintacephale]

[ardor-mohr]

“What cannot be said  will be wept.”

— Sappho, Fragments (ca. early 6th century BC)

“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak….It was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.”

— Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams (1942) 

“Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones’s eyes.”

— José Saramago, The Gospel According To Jesus Christ (1991)

[soracities]

Walt Whitman, “To One Shortly to Die”, Leaves of Grass

[Text ID: “I am exact and merciless, but I love you —”]

[soracities]

what are your favorite quotes on kindness and empathy? thank you🕯❤️

💓 💌

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”

— Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”

— George Saunders, Congratulations, by the way

— Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I’ve never told you this,” she said. “But there’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot. I don’t know when this came to me; it was a few years ago. There’s a difference between leaving it where you empty it and taking it back to the front of the store. It’s significant.” “Because somebody has to take them in.” “Yes. And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world…You move out of your isolation and become universal.”

— Andre Dubus, “Out of the Snow”, Dancing After Hours

“When you stand before me and see me, what do you know about the pain inside me and what do I know about yours? And if I kneeled before you and cried and told you, what more would you know about me than hell, when someone tells you that it is hot and horrible? That’s why people should stand before each other as reverently, as pensively, as lovingly, as standing before the entrance to hell.” 

— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak

“I’d like to think this [happy ending] isn’t weakness or… evasion… but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.”

— Atonement (2007), dir. Joe Wright

— Harvey (1950), dir. Harry Koster

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?”

— Simone Weil, “School Studies”

“I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding–not even that–no. Just for your recognition of me in you.”

— Tennessee Williams, “Sweet Bird of Youth”

“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work.”

— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“In Middlemarch love enables knowledge. Love is a kind of knowledge. If Fred didn’t love Mary, he would have no reason to exercise his imagination on her family. It’s love that makes him realize that two women without their savings are a real thing in the world and not merely incidental to his own sense of dishonor. It’s love that enables him to feel another’s pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another’s lesson, one another’s duty.”

— Zadie Smith, “Middlemarch and Everybody”

“Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.”

— Susan Sontag, New Year’s Resolutions

— Vincent D’Onofrio (x)

"It was past time for us, with or without irony, to be more divine; if we can guess what God’s benevolence might be it is because we guess at benevolence in ourselves."

— Clarice Lispector, “Mineirinho”

“Look what happens when the tongue / Cannot say to kindness, / “I will be your slave.” / The moon / Covers her face with both hands / And can’t bear / To look.”

— Hafiz, “Covers Her Face with Both Hands”

“I scream for kindness. Let there be kindness. There is bloody little and never at a high enough level.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“Outside, where the snow is turning to slush, I walk with my hand very gently round your shoulders. Not to harm anyone: simple enough, that hope seems an ambition vast enough to consume a lifetime.”

— Geoff Dyer, “Parting Shots”

— Hozier, from an interview with NPR

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

“In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.”

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

“Years ago I was on the midtown cross-town bus in NYC, in evening rush hour, in January, in the sleeting wind and rain.

Yeah, it sucked.

The bus moved at a crawl, and everyone on it seemed depressed. It would've been far faster to walk across town, but the weather was too godawful to bear. Everyone was definitely hating their life that day.

When we reached 10th Ave, the bus driver made a surprising announcement.

He said, "Ladies and Gentleman, we are now nearing the Hudson River. I'm going to ask you to do me a favor. When you get off the bus, I'm going to hold out my hand. As you walk past me, I want you to drop your troubles into the palm of my hand. I'll take your troubles for you, and when I drive past the river, I'll throw them in. The reason I want to do this is because you all seem like you've had a bad day, and I don't want you taking all your worries and sorrows home to your friends and families now. Because they deserve better than that, don't they? So you just leave your troubles here with me to dispose of, and you all go have a wonderful night, OK?"

The whole bus — the whole grumpy lot of us — broke into laughter. (Some of us, myself included, might have even shed a tear or two.) And one by one, as we filed off the bus, we dropped our troubles into the palm of this good man's hand, and we stepped off the bus with smiles on our faces.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, “Dear Ones - A Story”

— Hannah Gadsby, Nanette

[carnationhousehold]

“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

“For some things there are no wrong seasons, which is what I dream of for me.”

“Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?”

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

“YOU SHOULD LIMIT THE NUMBER OF TIMES YOU ACT AGAINST YOUR NATURE, LIKE SLEEPING WITH PEOPLE YOU HATE. IT’S INTERESTING TO TEST YOUR CAPABILITIES FOR A WHILE BUT TOO MUCH WILL CAUSE DAMAGE”

“That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”

“So I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see him.”

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.”