But what is so headstrong as youth?

an archive of words that reached me

[noteworthynotions]

“It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

[mournfulroses]

Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Ann Dvidow-Goodman written c. 1950, featured in The Collected Letters

[thenevernovel]

She asked me if I was happy the other day. I said I think so. Then she asked what it felt like. I couldn't really say. It's easier to describe the feeling when you're sad because it's a heavy thing in your pockets. But happy is just the walk home. You don't even notice it.

Excerpt from a novel I will never write

Get the Never Novel here

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[wordsthat-speak]

“Please just move the hell on. I don’t want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers.”

— The Stupid Things We Hold Onto (Ryan O'Connell)

[larmoyante]

“I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.”

— Warsan Shire

[classichorrorblog]

Misery (1990)

[lifeinpoetry]

“i am crowded by your absence.”

— Mallory Pearson, from “The Heaviest Rain We Ever Had,” published in Kingdoms in the Wild

[lunamonchtuna]

— Unknown (via lunamonchtuna)

[kimberleypearce]

“Somewhere on the other side of this wide night / and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.”

— Carol Ann Duffy, excerpt of Words, Wide Night (via henrydear)

[noteworthynotions]

"A longing carressed him, and it was so sharp that he wanted to cry to get it out of his breast."

John Steinbeck, The Red Pony

[noteworthynotions]

"The artist prays by creating."

Flannery O'Connor, The Enduring Chill

[noteworthynotions]

— Mahmoud Darwish (commonly attributed to)

[mournfulroses]

Alfred de Musset, from a poem titled "The Muse," featured in The Penguin Book of French Poetry: 1820-1950

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Joseph Brodsky, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

“Come love, make me better than I was. Come teach me a kinder way to say my own name.”

- Andrea Gibson, from "Good Light," Lord of the Butterflies

[feral-ballad]

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from Notes on Grief

[timefeelslikeamidnightride]

“Perhaps—I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”

— Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (via bookmania)