UGH!

“Dare to let it hurt…and dare to let it feel good.”

[macrolit]

“To have compassion for those who suffer is a human quality which everyone should possess, especially those who have required comfort themselves in the past and have managed to find it in others.”

— Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (featured in our 15-book giveaway)

[orgulho]

“Quando a gente conversa. Contando casos, besteiras. Tanta coisa em comum. Deixando escapar segredos. E eu não sei que hora dizer. Me dá um medo, que medo. É que eu preciso dizer que te amo.”

— Cazuza.  

[lazyydaisyyy]

These feelings...they will get easier. They’ll stop being the only thing you feel, they’ll fade and make room for other feelings. And then, in time, you’ll look at them from far away, almost entirely without pain, as if they were felt by somebody else.

Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

[wildestdream]

I love how in Willow MV when Taylor enters the glass cage, she’s content to sing and play and it’s only when she realises that she can’t escape to be with her lover that she panics. Combining that with the fishbowl scene from the Lover MV, her lover decides to join her in the glass cage and she’s happy again in this essay I will-

[sunastra]

“My mother said I could be anything / I wanted—but I chose to live.”

— Thanksgiving 2006, Ocean Vuong

[feverfuckery]

“Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.”

— Ocean Vuong / On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[ohamarys]

from INTO THE BREACH, Ocean Vuoung

[sunastra]

“If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else / was coming.”

— Immigrant Haibun, Ocean Vuong

[noctipotent]

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth we’re briefly gorgeous

[dirbyagnesvarda]

remember when ocean vuong said “the most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed & remember loneliness is still time spent with the world” and “to look at something is to fill your whole life with it” and “don’t we touch each other just to prove we’re still here” and “if only briefly, hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep” and “i miss you more than i remember you” and “days i feel like a human being, while other days i feel more like a sound, i touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who i was” 

[xshayarsha]

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

[anthropologyofwater-deactivated]

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

[januaryhoney]

wild geese, mary oliver / the night café, vincent van gogh / someday i’ll love ocean vuong, ocean vuong

[atticuspoems]

[langleavpoetry]

[heavensghost]

Natalie Wee, from Practice makes perfect

@natalieweepoetry

[goodzillo-deactivated20220127]

literally no matter what else ever happens with the show I’m gonna go up to bat for bojack because it’s legitimately the only show I know that’s just consistently correct about recovery and ““redemption”” (scare quotes because it’s a terrible concept to apply to anything more morally complex than WWE but I don’t have any better shorthands to convey the idea)... like I can’t think of any other show that doesn’t make ““redemption”” easy, portrays recovery as non linear and ugly, emphasizes the importance of support networks without undercutting personal agency, and is able to balance all that while at least narratively holding its characters accountable for the consequences of their actions.