Tenderness

"But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels for me. Can you understand what I am saying? Does it feel this way to you?"

[gouged-doll]

erich fromm, the art of loving

[mournfulroses]

Olivia Tapiero, from her book titled "Nothing At All," originally published in January 2026

[weltenwellen]

Didi Jackson, from "Poem With the Last Line as the First"

[lifeinpoetry]

I build barricades in front of my desire, I halt my ruddy poethics. // I cough with hunger for you.

— Rosie Stockton, from "PUMPJACK," Fuel

[weltenwellen]

Danez Smith, “little prayer”

[phenomenologicallyy]

A Myth of Devotion, Louise Glück

[theoptia]

Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata: Escaping Texts

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, "Ghost Heart", Instructions for Traveling West

[weltenwellen]

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

[free-my-mindd]

[letterful]

[petaltexturedskies]

Ada Limón, “Instructions on Not Giving Up” in The Carrying: Poems (originally published in 2017)

[petaltexturedskies]

Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947

[weltenwellen]

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

[weltenwellen]

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

[petaltexturedskies]

Albert Camus, in a diary entry wr. c. April 1937, from Notebooks 1935-1951

[petaltexturedskies]

Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1939-1947

[petaltexturedskies]

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray