PASSADE

a blog for beautiful words

[lifeinpoetry]

We have built cathedrals out of spite and splintered bone, of course they aren’t pretty, nothing holy ever is—

Brenna Twohy, from “To the Guy in the Back of the Room Complaining About Listening to Another Rape Poem,” Forgive Me My Salt (via luthienne)

[thequotejournals]

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

Maya Angelou

[lifeinpoetry]

Ten sugar-dipped strawberries. Ten humming sailors. Let the church say amen. Let the chapel doors open and open again. Ten gentle explorers who found my body buried inside itself. Who can see in the dark. Who can baptize me from across the continent. Let the church of my legs say bless. Let the church of my breasts say oh god. You have found the presents I hid from you. You have grown in me a basin I can never fill. Ten wise men. Ten pilgrimages across my stomach. Ten lit candles. Ten holy ghosts. I am a séance. I am a séance.

— Sierra DeMulder, “God Bless Your Fingers,”Today Means Amen

[florizels]

BENTNECK: Then he closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and he took it all into his mouth, the room and the world, the causes and the outcomes, the couch and the game, the gun and the stash, the fix and the flesh, the anger and the relief, the hope and the violence, the illusions of adulthood, chief among which is childhood, the growth and the decay, the decay and the rot, he took it into his mouth until his mouth was warm and leaked a little and bulged at the lip like a piteous frog’s. This is Beauty speaking, with my warm mouth.

Joyelle McSweeney, The Warm Mouth from My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (via soracities)

[quotemadness]

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.

Doris Lessing (via quotemadness)

[lifeinpoetry]

Am I to be cursed forever with becoming / somebody else on the way to myself?

Audre Lorde, from “Change of Season,” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (via lifeinpoetry)

[wordsnquotes]

Who’s the real you? The person who did something awful, or the one who’s horrified by the awful thing you did? Is one part of you allowed to forgive the other?

Rebecca Stead, Goodbye Stranger  (via autobibliography)

[soracities]

[…] I found the rooms between the violence of comets. I threw myself into anything’s path. Even the sky bent around me. How lonely to be something that nothing wants to kill.

Jeremy Radin, from ‘So I Locked Myself Inside a Star for Twenty Years’

[victoriajoan]

[Your poems] will tell all that happened, and more, except how, in your worst moments, they failed you.

Ted Hughes, from Collected Poems (via victoriajoan)

[durgapolashi]

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

Alice Walker, LIVING BY THE WORD (via durgapolashi)

[bunlly]

Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.

Kait Rokowski

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.

Lao Tzu

[oofpoetry]

That summer I did not go crazy but I wore very close very close to the bone.

Dorothy Allison, from “To the Bone” (via oofpoetry)

[literarymiscellany]

Desire as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

Anne Carson, “On Hedonism,” Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present.  (via plathisms)

[lifeinpoetry]

Here is the handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouthful of dirt, this poetry.

Margaret Atwood, Mushrooms (excerpt)

[wordsnquotes]

Sometimes, all you can do is lie in bed, and hope to fall asleep before you fall apart.

William C. Hannan (via wordsnquotes)

[postcolonialfeminist]

Audre Lorde argues throughout her work that we should not be protected from what hurts. We have to work and struggle not so much to feel hurt but to notice what causes hurt, which means unlearning what we have learned not to notice. We have to do this work if we are to produce critical understandings of how violence, as a relation of force and harm, is directed toward some bodies and not others.

Sara Ahmed ‘The Promise of Happiness’ (via mehreenkasana)