Mourn and Glory

she/her // to contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun

[rosequa]

"I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1811)

[rosequa]

"my whole life smells like you."

Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

[rosequa]

"Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heaven sweet — so deadly sad — that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by."

Charlotte Brontë, from Jane Eyre

[deadpanwalking]

why do you think it's so common for writers to insert themselves into their stories?

I don't know.

[rosequa]

"There is no magic to immortality.

"In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither but the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a bee would alight near the spot where the lotus had blossomed, and its essence was released again, momentary but undeniable.

"Egypt loved the lotus because it never dies. It is the same for people who are loved."

Anita Diamant, from The Red Tent

[nehmesis]

Demi Ev. / Is it the Fruit

[rosequa]

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

"The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

"Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

"The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

"The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

"All art is quite useless."

Oscar Wilde, preface featured in The Picture of Dorian Gray