letters & meaning

It's always words that undress you.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Often, however, suffering and happiness broke over me in one wave.

Hermann Hesse, from “Steppenwolf,” originally published c. 1927

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Edgar Allan Poe, from a letter to Helen Whitman featured in “The last letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman,”

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury. Wake me, witch,

Theodore Roethke, from The Collected Poems; “The Shape of the Fire,”

[goodreadss]

You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy.

Andrea Gibson, The Nutritionist (via goodreadss)

[shisasan]

April 27, 1915 The Diaries Of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923

[ellliexo]

You are allowed to be both a masterpiece & a work in progress, simultaneously

Sophia Bush (via ellliexo)

[quotemadness]

I had no idea what I wanted, only that I wanted something, which is the worst kind of wanting.

David Levithan

[purgatorybridge-deactivated2021]

““The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.””

— - A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (via katiesclassicbooks)

[yesterdaysprint]

The Elmdale News, Kansas, March 2, 1911

[writingdotcoffee]

If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Her capacity to forget and to live in the moment, while it more frequently landed her in grave trouble, made her also responsive without calculation to the returning glow of kindness. That she had no memory made her generous.

Iris Murdoch, from “The Bells,” originally published c. December 1958

[barcarole]

“My soul is soft and plastic; and it always assumes the form of the place in which it lives, the form of that which it hears and sees. Thus is grows large, spacious and bright, like the evening sky above a deserted sea, or it contracts into a little wad, turns into a little cube, stretches out, like a gray corridor between deaf stone walls. There are many doors, but there is no way out—”

— Leonid Andreyev, The Curse of the Beast (trans. Dmitry Fadeyev)

[books-n-quotes]

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one’s life for love.

Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli   (via books-n-quotes)

[books-n-quotes]

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story (via books-n-quotes)

[books-n-quotes]

Destroying things is much easier than making them.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (via books-n-quotes)

[books-n-quotes]

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters (via books-n-quotes)

[durenajaf]

Anger is such that it destroys the heart of even the wise man. He who has no control over his anger has no control over his mind.

Imam Jaffar Sadiq (a.s.)

Source: ak-Kafi, v.2, p.231, no.13

(via sufferconsciously)