#ltierature

[howifeltabouthim]

I'd been using any distraction I could to stay at one remove from reality, one step ahead of it, but that felt like a nearly lethal dose of the stuff. I couldn't take it, I freely admit.

Joseph Knox, from True Crime Story

[nostalgicacademia]

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry   Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand. All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear. One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.

— Sylvia Plath,  Morning Song

[foreverlostinliterature]

Malik Books | Los Angeles, CA

**photos from Malik Books website

[thebooksaidthat]

“Tell me everything later,” she says, and I can't stop the grin from spreading over my face because for the first time I have someone to tell everything to later.

Nita Tyndall, Who I was with Her

[bookofkhidr]

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Toni Morrison, from The Bluest Eye

[padfootdidit]

we’re trying to decolonise our english curriculum at uni, so if anyone has any ideas of representative authors/books to study then pls chuck them in the replies/my inbox

we’re trying to start with a module we have which focuses on the transformation of the novel (as a literary form) from like austen era to mid 1950s (but poetry suggestions would be great too!)

current reading list for it is: northanger abbey, pamela, jane eyre, adam bede, the turn of the screw, mrs dalloway, the english patient, wide sargasso sea, the rainbow

[uncannyarchive]

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

[theglasschild]

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Mark Strand, Almost Invisible