[cinematicjourney]

On the Beach at Night Alone (2017) | dir. Hong Sang-soo

[charlemane]

Heathcliff's introduction // Heathcliff meeting his own son

[aqua-regia009]

The Forest of Suicides - Canto XIII, line 11: Here the brute Harpies make their nest - Canto XIII, line 34: And straight the trunk exclaim’d, ‘Why pluck'st thou me?’ Gustave Dore’s Illustrations for “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri

[feral-ballad]

Tawanda Mulalu, from Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die: Poems; “All we got was autumn. All we got was winter”

[petaltexturedskies]

Katherine Mansfield, from a diary entry dated 25 June 1907, from Journals of K.M.

[1uv2hurt]

but would you disappear with me?

[pollen]

Mary Oliver, from "Blossom"

[roses--and--rue]

Victorian hair wreath in an unusual, octagonal shaped shadow box.

Though it’s presumed that all Victorian hair work is mourning or memorial related, most hair wreaths and small arrangements like this are simply family keepsakes. The technique used was gimp work, simply weaving the hair from family members with wire and looping the strands into flowers. 

via Roses & Rue Antiques

[theravingcelt]

“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”

— The Alexiad, written by Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.

[exhaled-spirals]

« I keep a journal of quotes, lines from songs, poetry. Nothing is my original thought — but all of it struck me as meaningful when I wrote it down.

[…] From my early 20s, there are pages trying to convince myself that friendship, which I had, could be as valuable as romantic love, which I didn’t. (Andrew Sullivan: “If love is about the bliss of primal unfreedom, friendship is about the complicated enjoyment of human autonomy.”) […] Ultimately, when I was no longer so preoccupied with finding romantic love, my shift toward looking more closely at my other relationships is mirrored in my transcriptions: Vivian Gornick on her relationship with her mother; Durga Chew-Bose on the rapturous, fresh intimacy that I miss now.

[…] Thrumming beneath the pages is a shifting self-image. When I read them, I recognize the past me who saw herself in these quotes, but I don’t roll my eyes at her. With others’ words as intermediaries, the harsh light of hindsight softens. If keeping a journal would be a way to look in the mirror and make an honest appraisal of myself, keeping a commonplace book is more like looking at myself out of the corner of my eye.

It’s an admittedly different approach from my generation’s inclination toward full-frontal accountability. Daily diary apps and self-improvement podcasts and confessional Instagram stories evince a belief that to grow as a person you have to be entirely, unflinchingly forthcoming. But I couldn’t catalog my flaws without flinching. And I don’t think I need to. That’s part of the point of reading, I think: When I find myself too earnest, too impatient, too much, I can be in conversation with other minds instead. Keeping a commonplace book feels like a kinder way to grow, by wrestling with the articulations of others in the open as I hopefully adjust myself within. »

— Charley Locke, “Commonplace Books Are Like a Diary Without the Risk of Annoying Yourself”

[1five1two]

'Semele'. Jannik Senium. 2025.

[gorgonapologist]

When Daphne transforms into a bay tree, the moment is one of both horror and deliverance. She is no longer what she once was, but the metamorphosis frees her from the unwanted attention of Apollo. This duality of horror and emancipation sits, I think, at the core of female transformation. Within the horror genre (and arguably everywhere else), bodies read as female are always subject to pain, and to the threat of violation. Becoming something else—a tree, a freak, a monster—preempts this pain and reduces the risk of harm. It may even, if the transformation is the right one, allow you to cause harm in return.

Julia Armfield, On Body Horror and the Female Body

[starrywisdomsect]

Jan Švankmajer’s Castle of Otranto (1977) is an animated adaptation of Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel of the same name. This novel is credited with the start of the genre of gothic fiction, and was heavily influential on the horror genre as a whole.

[marypickfords]

Anna and the Wolves (Carlos Saura, 1973)

[vintage-ukraine]

Lab technician in the Kyiv Medical Institute preparing equipment for an exam, 1947

[apoemaday]

Instead of Depression

by Andrea Gibson

try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine Spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave.

[derangedrhythms]

Life was a burden to be carried as far as the grave and then dumped. Life was a Vale of Tears. Life was a pre-death experience.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?