Upsaliensis

she/her | 27 | Sweden | MA English Literature

[upsaliensis]

Anne Sexton, from The Book of Folly (1972)

"Dear God, wouldn't it be / good enough to just drink cocoa?"

[upsaliensis]

"I want to be as brilliant as you see me. I think that is one of the best gifts we can give each other, to hold space for the stars that we are in each other's eyes."

- Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran

[upsaliensis]

[upsaliensis]

[upsaliensis]

How else do we return

to ourselves but to fold

the page so it points to

the good part.

- Ocean Vuong, "Time is a Mother"

[tendermimi]

Mary Oliver, ‘north country’

[upsaliensis]

Carolina Rediviva, Uppsala

[styx-x]

comfort

[upsaliensis]

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high ways of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

- W.B. Yeats, "Adam's Curse"

[upsaliensis]

"You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live."

- Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

[hungryblueghost]

"What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives."

—Tales From Earthsea: Dragonfly by Ursula Le Guin

[mossyshadows]

Marina Evlanova

[deviika]

1. Mary Oliver | 2. Katherine Mansfield

[upsaliensis]

"Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?"

- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

[upsaliensis]

[upsaliensis]

"But easier, she reminded herself, was not the same as better."

- Frances Hardinge

[upsaliensis]

"I was learning that who you are and what you do and make and wear and say can be a contribution to people around you, that many of the most valuable gifts are not direct or material or measurable. That even how you live your life can be a gift to others."

- Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Non-Existence

[upsaliensis]

"In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other."

- Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Non-Existence