[loveage-moondream]

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”

— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

There are no words for what you did to me.

Sarah Kane, from Phaedra’s Love

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

But I am too tired to write, too driven, too screaming inside. I feel too fiercely to write, even to talk. It is no good to be alone either; though one makes no noise the screaming is all there.

Martha Gellhorn, from selected Letters

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

“I don't feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.”

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

I've been deceived too often; I've ceased to form attachments, to permit myself to feel attractions.

Henry James, from The Portrait of a Lady

[adrasteiax]

“I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.”

— Agha Shahid Ali, from The Country without a Post-Office: Poems; “Nearer,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[lifeinpoetry]

“If I want to hide / forever, let me.”

— — Stephanie Rogers, from “Fat Girl Penta Rima,” Fat Girl Forms

[luthienne]

“Words! be / sick as I am sick,”

— Frank O’Hara, from Selected Poems; “Mayakovsky”

[existential-celestial]

“And I’m a master of speaking silently—all my life I’ve spoken silently and I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.”

— The Meek One, Fyodor Dostoevsky (b. 11 Nov 1821)

[existential-celestial]

“That’s the horror of it for me, that I understand everything!”

— The Meek One, Fyodor Dostoevsky

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“I do not really know whether I have survived. My inner self has shut itself up more and more. As though to protect itself, it has become inaccessible even to me,”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Elisabeth Schenck wr. c. January 1919

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

Fooling God, Louise Erdrich

[ID: I must be sharp and impetuous as knives.]

[adrasteiax]

“I am sick, sick. With this desperate fury.”

— Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[adrasteiax]

“And again the dark eats me: (…)”

— Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[luthienne]

“…I’m fed up with myself—with my difficulty in expressing myself in words about anything. I’m imprisoned in myself—even symbolically.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from Wartime Writings 1939-1944

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

“Nobody speaks to me. People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and—and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think that no one can. Can you?”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a letter to Arthur Davison Ficke featured in Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

[soracities]

What am I going to talk about? About this man I am now? About what I have become? About this dark, plain man sunk deep into an anguish that he cannot clarify or justify because the reasons for it are inexplicable?

Josefina Vicens, The Empty Book (trans. David Lauer)