wanna be friends? ;)

there's no specific topic, just all the poems and quotes that i love smashed together :>

[booksandothersecrets]

Normalise liking poetry because you like the way it sounds and art because you think its beautiful. You don’t have to understand the deeper meaning of something to appreciate it - poetry is bloody difficult to analyse and art requires an extensive knowledge of movements and artists to properly get - so please just wonder around art galleries and decide which pieces you’d buy if you could, and read out lines of poetry simply because they have a nice ring to them.

[narchis29]

"But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

[narchis29]

"each man's hell is in a different place:

mine is just up and behind

my ruined face."

-Charles Bukowski

[narchis29]

"I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.

Adult. You have become adult."

-Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions

[narchis29]

"She wouldn't wish love on anyone. It was the guest you welcomed and then couldn't be rid of."

-Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

[narchis29]

"I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision."

-Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952

[narchis29]

"So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me for I, too, am fluent in silence."

-R. Arnold

[narchis29]

"Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them."

-Edgar Allan Poe

[narchis29]

"Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense?"

-Rudy Francisco

[narchis29]

"Wars fought over a face like this," he murmured like he was talking to himself, my heart stopped beating and his thumbs moved lightly across my cheeks. "A man would work himself into the ground for it, go down to his knees to beg to keep it, endure torture to protect it, take a bullet for it," his eyes came to mine, "poison his brother to possess a face like this."

-Kristen Ashley, Knight

[narchis29]

"We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?"

-David Foster Wallace

[narchis29]

Softness

don’t you dare, for one minute,

believe that my kindness makes me

anything but insurmountable.

i did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt,

and stagger back, wounded and alive,

just to hear you call me weak for trying.

i opened my door to heartache—

i gave her the fucking key.

my softness for wayward strangers

has made me nothing less

than a halfway house for aching soles.

so when you open your mouth

and call me ‘baby’

understand that i am not your next victim

in a laundry list of broken girls.

you think i don’t know you? people like you?

people with mouths for hands.

i’ve got skin like topsoil

and your teeth could never take root.

so when you go looking to make a plaything

of a sunburst,

you better look for someone with less fire

than me.

because softness or no,

i will eat you alive

before i let you make a meal of me.

-Ashe Vernon

[narchis29]

"I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again."

-Nicole Lyons, Hush

[narchis29]

"When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps."

-John Lennon

[narchis29]

"The world should have stopped, but it didn't. The world kept on going. How can the world just keep on going? An earthquake in India kills a thousand people, and the world keeps on going. A famine in China kills a million people, and the world keeps on going. The twin towers of the World Trade Center buckle and fall, and the world, the world keeps on going."

-Alison McGhee, All Rivers Flow To The Sea

[narchis29]

"What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings."

-David Foster Wallace

[narchis29]

"She will rise.

With a spine of steel and a roar like thunder,

she will rise."

-Nicole Lyons