[firstfullmoon]

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”

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

“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”

— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”

But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?

— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”

“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”

— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey

[heartshop]

Chew your way into a new world. Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt again. Self-reinvention is everything. Spin many nests. Cultivate stinging bristles. Don’t get sentimental about your discarded skins.

Amy Gerstler, an excerpt from the poem ‘Advice from a Caterpillar’

[weltenwellen]

Claudia Rankine, from “Some years there exists a wanting to escape… ”, Citizen

[biracy]

[Text ID: You are not sick, you are injured— / you ache for the rest of life. End ID]

[theglasschild]

“In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life. In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter. I could have nodded, I could have smiled without showing my teeth. In some small way I could have wordlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so that I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.”

— Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

[phifag]

“If we imagine that we are purely, or even mainly, rational beings, we will never know ourselves.”

— Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ (via scientificphilosopher)

[metamorphesque]

— Last Toast, Anna Akhmatova (translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky)

[text ID: I drink to our ruined house / To the evil of my life / To our loneliness together / And I drink to you— / To the lying lips that have betrayed us, / To the dead-cold eyes, / To the fact that the world is brutal and coarse / To the fact that God did not save us.]

[petaltexturedskies]

Find me, dearest, in the darkened garden

Now, while everyone's asleep

And only stars look down on us.

Ivan Bunin, from "Mitya's Love" in The Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin wr. c. 1921

[cruising1980]

this is from the incest diary Would yall be mad if i said this was amadeo thevampirearmand core

[skrewz-deactivated20190113]

jenny holzer

[flowersandfashion]

I'm Your Man, Mitski /// “you said the lambs were ready,” come the slumberless to the land of nod, Traci Brimhall /// I WILL BE GOOD AS LONG AS YOU WANT ME, @thegirlhoodtheory /// 'the reciprocity of the attack dog and the hand that holds the short leash' (edited), @brutaliakhoa /// Moon Song, Phoebe Bridgers /// Still Life Based on Hunting (detail), c. 1665-1701, David De Koninck /// It Will Come Back, Hozier /// "you’ve always been more of a dog person," @tdaspoetry

[reluctantmosbyrelater]

i know i just reblogged from this account but i just saw this bigger post and it's so good

[girlbytoriamos]

the vampire armand

avina st. graves, skin of a sinner// palma vecchio- 'adoration of the shepard with donor' // richey edwards // ?? // ?? // stephen adly guirgis- the last days of judas iscariot // david foster wallace- infinite jest // ada limón- bright dead things

[philosophybits]

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”

— George Eliot, “Letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones (1875)”

[kerryquotesquotes]

“I am—yet what I am none cares or knows…”

— John Clare, I am!

[briery]

“Your loneliness is precious to you, I know. Does it disturb you to know you are dear to me? Do not let it. It is such a quiet feeling. It is like the light coming into a room—moonlight—”

— Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to J.M. Murry, dated December 14, 1919, Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield (Penguin Classics, 1977)

[moldavite-moved]

why is this about to make me sob

[sorryhahaifellasleep]

a poem i am sure everyone has seen but i'm still going to share anyway

as well as this other poem inspired by giovanni's

and this beautiful tweet

[danskjavlarna]

“You wear a mask, love, a livid and violent mask, to look at you is to penetrate into the vortex of my nothingness, may your silence make itself mine and we’ll wander together in a lacunous vastitude, that’s why I speak, speak to exorcise you, that’s why I work with words, also to exorcise myself, that the bitterness of the abysses may cease, that may break in this tide of phonemes, of syllables, that a light may break, exempt of anguish.” “I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things—and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snares of words: the words I say hide others—which? Maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.””

—

Hilda Hilst, The Obscene Madame D and Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

via http://invisiblestories.tumblr.com/

[danskjavlarna]

“I believe that the old mysteries conceal much more dangerous things than knowledge of phases of the moon and eclipses of the sun, things that really had to be concealed—but which do not need to be concealed nowadays because the foolish throng would not believe them anyway, only laugh at them—things that obey the same laws of harmony as the stars and which are therefore similar to them.” —Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face