"I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"
White Noise by Don DeLillo
"We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?"
Nine Lives by Ursula K. Le Guin
Skaters by Marianne von Werefkin
"How are you? Fine, and you? It's not that we don't care, it's that we're terrified that someone will actually break down and tell us. Everyone I know is in some kind of pain. Everyone."
Journal, Day Three by Richard Siken
how poignant and heart-rending is it that we're all going to work or school and riding our bikes and feeding our dogs and driving to the grocery store and emailing back our coworkers and yet among it all we're each screaming (somewhat out of sync) someone please please love me for this for something for anything!
Howling at the Moon by Darshana Suresh
"Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to work out. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas, in centre stage, and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines, wondering why we no longer have a part, or want a part, in the whole damn thing. So everybody’s experienced this. When it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling goes from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain, which is really involved with the recognition of defeat."
"It astonishes me sometimes -no,often- how every person I get to know -everyone, regardless of everything, by which i mean everything- lives with some profound personal sorrow. [...] Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is-and if we join them-your wild to mine-what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?"
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
Nothing Personal by James Baldwin
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
