Jenny

“The broken places ache, hard absences, And silences, a voice you loved that will Not come again, the laughs, the presences— That loss still makes its pressure in the chest. The friends, the lovers in their only lives. Grief, that carrion bird, still comes to rest Inside the heart; its talons click like knives More cruelly sharp than any metal blade. So many years. And here we all still are, Unable to believe the change life made, Still so near, no matter, now, how far.”

— Richard Bausch, from “Remembrance,” social media post, 11 September 2022

fairydrowning

-Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

[TEXT ID: "It is a terrible thing / To be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world." END ID]

voirlvmer

Now I understand how grief is like a mushroom— how it thrives in dark conditions. How it springs directly from what is dead. Such a curious blossoming thing, how it rises and unfurls in spontaneous bourgeoning, a kingdom all its own.

Like a mushroom, most of grief is never seen. It grows and expands beneath everything. Sometimes it stays dormant for years.

Rosemerry Trommer, from “Mycelial”

#poetry #grief #quotes

#poetry #literature #quotes

“Maybe in this season, drunk and sentimental, I’m willing to admit a part of me, crazed and kamikaze, ripe for anarchy, loves still.”

—

Sandra Cisneros, from “One Last Poem for Richard” featured in My Wicked Ways

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reverse.”

—

William S. Burroughs - from a letter to Jack Kerouac

“I discovered I must must must love, insanely.”

— Forugh Farrokhzad, from ‘Window’ featured in Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad

#quotes #lit

“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”

— Anais Nin - from The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol.1

#quotes #literature

#quotes #words #wordsnquotes

“Still full of blood and hopes.”

— Wislawa Szymborska, from ‘Funeral (I)’ featured in Map: Collected and Last Poems

“Now it seems to me the heart must enlarge to hold the losses we have ahead of us. I hold to a certain sadness the way others search for joy,”

— Marvin Bell, from “Gemwood,” Fifty Contemporary Poets; The Creative Process, ed. Alberta T. Turner (David McKay Co., Inc. 1977)

“So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress.”

— Vincent van Gogh, from The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Ronald de Leeuw, transl. Arnold J. Pomerans (Penguin Classics, 1997)

“I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar, from Memoirs of Hadrian, transl. Grace Frick (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005)

“In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”

— Joan Didion, from Blue Nights (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

“Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “LIII” of Adonais; Selected Poems (Random House, 1994)

officialicedcoffee

“He exhausts me and I don’t love him. Only boys I love are allowed to exhaust me.”

— Fortesa Latifi (via madgirlf)

officialicedcoffee

“Millions of words passed between us in our lives and if it came down to one sentence, I would tell you only this: I am afraid I will love you always.”

— Fortesa Latifi (via winterkristall)