Unspoken Words.

[luthienne]

Jack Gilbert, from Collected Poems; "Waking at Night"

[fifidunks]

Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless 

[throughwordss]

[quotespile]

“Our dreams have been doctored. We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter…”

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

[megairea]

“I’m a mere shadow of a man; of all the ghosts haunting this town today, none is ghostlier than I. The only loves I’ve known were phantom loves, rare and vacillating as will-o’-the-wisps.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies (tr. by Stuart Gilbert & Lionel Abel), 1943

[gnossienne]

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

[gnossienne]

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

[soracities]

“How could she be with me one moment and the next not? How could she be elsewhere, absolutely? That was what I could not understand, could not be reconciled to, cannot still. Once out of my presence she should by right become pure figment, a memory of mine, a dream of mine, but all the evidence told me that even away from me she remained solidly, stubbornly, incomprehensibly herself. And yet people do go, do vanish. That is the greater mystery; the greatest.”

— John Banville, The Sea

[soracities]

“my home which can only stay inside in my blood—my home which does not fit with any geography.”

— Sujata Bhatt, from “The One Who Always Goes Away”, The Stinking Rose

[lifeinpoetry]

“Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone. What’s left? Whatever you aren’t, which is what makes you—a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.”

— — Kaveh Akbar, from “The Miracle,” Pilgrim Bell

[lifeinpoetry]

“Which me will survive all these liberations?”

— — Mohammed El-Kurd, from “War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens,” Rifqa

[quotespile]

“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”

— John Irving, The World According to Garp

[kafk-a]

Bernadette Mayer, from The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica

[lavrinko]

on the walls of the monastery

[hklnvgl]

[quotespile]

“Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself… Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.”

— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

[ginkovskij]

maybe the real punishment was all the acquaintances we made along the way

[luthienne]

“my darling I love everything that is not mine you for example”

—

Blanca Varela, from The Blinding Star (tr. Sara Daniele Rivera & Lisa Allen Ortiz)

[Original: querido mío adoro todo lo que no es mío tú por ejemplo]