olive & sage

Anna | 25 | USA

I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished… when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.

[oliveandsage]

Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon 

[anancientheart]

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

Douglas Coupland

[urbnite]

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Does it seem as though September had come? How swiftly summer has fled, and what report has it borne to heaven of misspent time and wasted hours? Eternity only will answer. The ceaseless flight of the seasons is to me a very solemn thought…

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Abiah Root written c. September 1846 

[explore-blog]

If I ask you, ‘What do you want out of life?’ and you say something like, 'I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,’ it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything. A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is: what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Mark Manson

[tylerknott]

[oliveandsage]

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting   over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

[grigiabot]

Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little.

Mary Oliver

[inspirationlane]

[delta-breezes]

Emily Jeffords | @emily_jeffords

[danielodowd-deactivated20170124]

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.

Mary Oliver, from New And Selected Poems, Volume Two 

[dampandghostly-deactivated20180]

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not the flowers, not the blackberries brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees; I won’t whisper my own name. One morning the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn’t see me—and I thought: so this is the world. I’m not in it. It is beautiful.

Mary Oliver, “October” (excerpt)

[wordsthat-speak]

Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight.

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

[grace--upon--grace]

[moonwhispers]

I feel like a time traveler: June, July, August. Summer dissolves in my mouth and I can’t remember what it tasted like.

Zoë Lianne, Erasure

[spunkh]