spring is coming with a strawberry in the mouth

[shojojidais]

[shojojidais]

But the nameless anguish pressing down on him? He knew now that was love, a hopeless love some twenty years in the past. A knife will rust after twenty years, but it's still a knife. The knife in his mother's heart now twisted in his.

Eileen Chang, "Jasmine Tea"

[shojojidais]

She wasn't a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered onto a screen--a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy purple satin. The years passed; the bird's feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.

Eileen Chang, "Jasmine Tea"

[shojojidais]

[melonatures]

KÄRLEK & ANARKI (Sweden, Netflix, 2020-) Sofie x Max // first kiss x last kiss

[kyrasaphira]

Statuette of Venus made from rock crystal quartz (Roman, 1st century BC)

[knightofleo]

the hauntings of Andrew Wyeth

[shojojidais]

There is a perverse mood of mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored. What honest man on being casually taken for a housebreaker, does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake?

Villette, Charlotte Brontë

[shojojidais]

"We must control ourselves. Be aware, perfectly lucid, give facts, feelings, and thoughts their appropriate form, not let ourselves be dragged along by them, like most people do." Sergio would tell me about this in his letters from Europe, before he returned, and then it was a matter of adjusting everything to human proportions, because excess is always more powerful than man; it was a personal discipline, almost a game, but when he spoke to me about anguish, that it would enter his breast and not allow him to think or breathe, because it was slowly invading him, possessing him through that initial wound, like a cold knife in the chest, I understood that I should apply everything he had taught me about form to that, and so between the two of us we would search for mild words to warm the wound, and we forbade ourselves any expression of emotion, because the first shout would set the beast free.

"Underground River," Inés Arredondo

[atomic-chronoscaph]

art by Gertrude Abercrombie (1940s, 1950s & 1960s)

[shojojidais]

Where can you find maternal love? It is nothing but an illusion manufactured by men. Look, look, there, there is only blood, why is there such a thing?

"Congruent Figures," Takahashi Takako

[svsspiria]

Isabelle Huppert by Serge Leblon

[shojojidais]

When I meet his gaze, now bold and scathing again, I realize that he can’t help it. He will always be that way: he loves me just as I love him. Could it be otherwise? The love between a mother and a son is the ultimate romantic melodrama, simply because it cannot be consummated.

Goliarda Sapienza, The Art of Joy

[shojojidais]

But an eight-year-old soul does not believe the arguments of reason. It shrinks into itself, quietly trembling and whimpering. An eight-year-old soul does not believe that this is the sound of a bell. Later, in daytime, it will believe this, but now, alone, defenseless, and in anguish, it does not know that this is a bell calling people to church. Who knows what this sound might be? It is sinister. If anguish and fear could be translated into sound, this is the sound they would make. If anguish and fear could be translated into color, it would be this uncertain, murky gray.

And the impression made by this predawn anguish will remain with this little creature for many years, for her whole life. This creature will continue to be woken at dawn by a fear and anguish beyond understanding. Doctors will prescribe sedatives; they will advise her to take evening walks, or to give up smoking, or to sleep in an unheated room, or with the window open, or with a hot water bottle on her liver. They will counsel many, many things—but nothing will erase from her soul the imprint of that predawn despair.

Teffi, "Kishmish"

[shojojidais]

She had always hated morals. She rejected conclusions and the myths they create in a world that erupts suddenly like a volcano, like a landslide, like a silent shadow wandering in search of a crumbling body.

The Naked Woman, Armonía Somers

[shojojidais]

A man was murdered, but there was not a drop of blood in sight, not a moment's struggle, not even any faint moaning. It was a quiet, seductive sort of crime, carried out as gently as a lover's whisper. I felt no stirring of conscience, and found myself transfixed by the sheer beauty of what seemed to flicker like a bright and colorful painting before my eyes. When the woman said 'frightening things are always beautiful,' and 'demons are as beautiful as the gods,' the words sounded to me like they were describing not just those gemlike test tubes, but the woman herself. She is a heroine ripped from the pages of a detective novel, a devil incarnate; a demon who has long been nesting in the fantasy world inside my head. She is the fantasy I have longed for, now manifested in the real world and come to comfort me in my loneliness.

Devils in Daylight, Junichiro Tanizaki

[precious-silly-thing-deactivate]

Mourning women in Egyptian tomb-paintings