[birdasaurus]

Sharon Radisch

[rozenstruikjes]

To love another is something like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief. — Anne Sexton

[kitty-n-classe]

[rozenstruikjes]

It was about trying to get the male and female voices like river currents, swirling around each other, tracing each other, overlapping. - Johnny Flynn

[weltenwellen]

Louise Glück, from “Marathon”, Poems 1962 - 2012

[rozenstruikjes]

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

[virtuosoofperversityy]

[rozenstruikjes]

A particular fragrance on a hillside, a stolen glance in a restaurant, a body brush in a crowded street, a particular posture by a passenger in an elevator, a flash of memory during daily conversations, the sound of familiar words in one's native tongue heard from an adjoining car at a red traffic light—each of these sensory reports activates private memories and intensifies the feeling of displacement, a feeling that one may have suppressed in order to get on with life. However, just as frequently and powerfully, these very reports may serve the opposite function of restoration and emplacement — by re-establishing connections.

Hamid Naficy

[hirokazukoreeda]

Le feu follet (The Fire Within) 1963, dir. Louis Malle.

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume (Bantam, 1984)

[hiddenshores]

“Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft.”

— Anne Michaels, from The Winter Vault

[hiddenshores]

“Sitting over words

very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing

not far

like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark

the echo of everything that has ever

been spoken

still spinning its one syllable

between the earth and silence”

— W. S. Merwin, “Utterance”, in The Rain in the Trees (1988)

[weltenwellen]

There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away.

Simone Weil, School Studies, Waiting For God (via weltenwellen)

[rozenstruikjes]

Beauty, love... actually, I think, all the time that I write, I'm writing about love or its absence... About love and how to survive––not to make a living but how to survive whole in a world where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of something.

Toni Morrison

[amusesociety]

[weltenwellen]

And at the center of the self, grief I thought I couldn’t survive.

Louise Glück, from “Aubade”, Poems 1962-2012

[eiginleiki]

Emil Zed and Agata Pospieszynska for Harper’s Bazaar