◆ @aryasnow | “Trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind was cleansing the bones.” (Anne Carson, The Glass Essay) // “A starlit or moonlite dome disdains all that man is, all mere complexities, the fury and the mire of human veins.” (W.B. Yeats, Byzantium) // “Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.” (Louise Glück, Snowdrops)
◆ @artauds | “We found each other / hungry / and we bit each other as fire bites, leaving wounds in us.” (Pablo Neruda, Absence) // “It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain… remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it.” (Sylvia Plath, Journals) // “I long for secret sunwalked places, and a god to take me up high.” (Euripides, Hippolytos)
◆ @artbreaths | “To imagine that the burning of Rome […] can only take place now within us…” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters) // “The weeping blood that adorns an unplucked lyre.” (Federico García Lorca, Sonnets of Dark Love)
◆ @athenaefilia | “Lips shine softly, and the shadows bright, round hollow eyes. The midnight skies light this face – and out of dark of night, one thing alone grows darker – our eyes” (Marina Tsvetaeva, Insomnia) // “Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell – a smell of dying moons and shadows.” (Zelda Fitzgerald, Letters)
◆ @antigonick | “There is no ground on which your soul and mine can meet.” (Anton Chekhov, The Seagull) // “I was exalted above a waste of almost waveless sea, palish grey, & dented with darker shadows for the small irregularities, the little ripples which represented character & life love & genius & happiness. But “I” was not exalted; “I” was practically non-existent.” (Virginia Woolf, Diaries) //.”When you are corn and roses and at rest I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost, to haunt the scene where I was happiest, to bend above the thing I love the most” (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Sonnets)
◆ @boykeats | “No, poets – real poets – do not hate the other, it’s impossible, how could they give up half their language, why would they want to cut their tongue in two and spit out one half.” (Hélène Cixous, Stigmata) // “Something illuminating and hovering in the purest painless ecstasy, a shining vision to contemplate with eyes wide open.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy) // ”You smile at everyone, like a seraph” (Marina Tsvetaeva, Insomnia) “You are like an angel, nothing touches you…” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
◆ @barcarole | “How much we both love to work on living, palpitating stuff, at white heat only. But I believe it is only after the white heat that the story really ripens. The white heat re-creates the emotional experience, but understanding does not crystallize at white heat.” (Anaïs Nin, Letters) // “To let it all soak in, to let it mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself.” (Etty Hillesum, Diary)
◆ @bironism | “Finally all this inconvinient, invincible pain, this agression, this displeasure that twists its great vital nerve, this martyrdom without malady, this voracity for meat, with hesitation we call it love.” (Hélène Cixous, Stigmata) // “Shall our blood fail? Or shall it become the blood of paradise?” (Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning) // “Even you, if you knew how this darkness soaks me through and through, and infuses holy fear in my vapour, you would pause to distnguish what hurts, from what amuses.” (D.H. Lawrence, Under the Oak)
◆ @dearorpheus | “With an old red hook in her mouth, the mouth that kept bleeding, into the terrible fields of her soul….” (Anne Sexton, Consorting with Angels) // “The heart threading a tunnel, a dark, dark tunnel: like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart or collapsing inwards from skin to soul” (Pablo Neruda, Death Alone) // “In the shivery depths I saw a great heart bright as a ruby suspended in the vault by a huge web. It was beating and with each beat there fell to the ground a huge gout of blood. It was too large to be the heart of a living creature. It was larger than the heart of a god. It is like the heart of agony.” (Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi)
◆ @dearestwatson | “I’m no more a woman than Christ was a man.” (Anne Sexton, Consorting with Angels) // “Horror cannot be spoken because it is alive; because it is silent and is going forward; it drips into the day and it drips into sleep. Sorrow-recalling pain.” (George Seferis, Last Stop) // “I said it again: come with me, as if I were dying, and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth or the blood that rose into the silence.” (Pablo Neruda, Come With Me)
◆ @hamlets-father | “Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.” (Margaret Atwood, Temptation) // “Your life is a painting in a dark museum and sometimes you examine it closely” (Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone) // “How he gave himself to it – Loved. Loved his inward world, his inner wilderness, that first world within”. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies)
◆ @lennuieternel | “My coal, my soul; the domes wash us in their darkgold.” (Marina Tsvetaeva, Poems for Moscow) // “I am still blazing in my golden hell” (Sylvia Plath, To A Jilted Lover) // “In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and fron the depths I hear that I am damned”. (Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal) // “And I wander in a land of barren boughs: if I break them, they bleed; I wander in a land of dry stones: if I touch them they bleed”. (T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral)
◆ @liminalhorror | “I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth” (Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary) // “We melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory”. (Virginia Woolf, The Waves) // “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul”. (Kate Chopin, The Awakening)
◆ @malglories | “Your eyes are like fantastic moons that shiver in some stagnant lake, your tongue is like a scarlet snake that dances to fantastic tunes, your pulse makes poisonous melodies, and your black throat is like the hole left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic tapestries.” (Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx) // “I only dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets, of honeybees above you murmuring into a crown”. (Mary Szybist, Hall)
◆ @nehmesis | “She wanted many more things than the love of one human being – the sea, the sky. She turned again to look at the distant blue, which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only one human being”. (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out) // “What do you want asks the sunbeam and what do you want asks hope lowering her white blouse”. (Odysseus Elytis, Clepsidras of the Unknown) // “The rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost Dionysian.” (Robert Lowell, Man and Wife)
◆ @provst | “She laughed and said: unlike the beauties of this world, in the curtain I am manifest and without the curtain I am hidden” (Jadi, Untitled Quatrain) // “This is my swan song. This is my double curse: I can never escape. I can never come near.” (Anne Sexton, Journal) // “I become a myth more radiant than any and, sculpted in dust, I am and am not, but I am. (Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Field of Flowers)
◆ @romanceangel | “This time I know – the love isn’t sick… no, indeed, it is health, the giving force, the outward reach instead of the inward grab.” (Anne Sexton, Letters) // “I recognize that I love – you – by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace. (Jacques Derrida, The Postcard) // “Then you kissed me – I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end. (Louise Glück, Marathon)
◆ @sirenoirs | “Deafening voices of wild seas broke your infant breast, too human and too soft;” (Arthur Rimbaud, Ophelia) // “…the sad and beautiful moonlight, which makes the birds in the trees dream and sob with ecstasy the water streams, the great slim water streams among the marbles…” (Paul Verlaine, Clair de Lune) // “She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver” (Oscar Wilde Salome) // “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity”: (Sylvia Plath, Elm)
◆ @serpenstiarae | “Your body is suffocating snow, as brightness, pouring itself out of you, as if you were burning inside. Under your skin the moon is alive” (Pablo Neruda, Ode To A Naked Beauty) // “Swan-white of heart; I smile not ever neither do I weep. I am as lovely as a dream in stone”. (Charles Baudelaire, Beauty) // “It’s funny, but I like being “pink and helpless” – When I know I seem that way, I feel terribly competent – and superior. I keep thinking, “Now those men think I’m purely decorative, and they’re just fools for not knowing better” – and I love being rather unfathomable”. (Zelda Fitzgerald, Letters)
◆ @stabernatty | “His Apollonian consciousness was, like a veil, merely covering the Dionysian world in front of him” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy) // “Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.” (Anne Sexton, The Saints Come Marching In) // “The sky darkens. Then begins the mystery, the gods of night, the beyond-pleasure. But how to translate this? (Albert Camus, The Return to Tipasa)
◆ @soracities | “The once-known way becoming wholly other, and ourselves estranged, changed, suspended where angels are rumored” (Sylvia Plath, The Great Carbuncle) // “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. […] We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” (Franz Kafka, Letters)
◆ @sobforsirius | “You can see my thoughts immersed in roses” (Guillaume Apollinaire, Palace) // “A single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down.” (Sylvia Plath, Winter Landscape With Rocks) // “Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such a thing as a romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance – that is all.” (Oscar Wilde, Letters)
◆ @thefuryofrainstorms | “Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle? (Sergio Chejfec, The Planets) // “Of what secret lights are we made?” (Hélène Cixous, Stigmata) // “Inside of the being there is a deflective mirror, a mirror distorted by the fog of solitude, of shyness, by the climate inside this particular being.” (Anaïs Nin, Winter of Artifice)
◆@violentwavesofemotion | “The great roots of night grow suddenly from your soul, and the things that hide in you come out again.” (Pablo Neruda, The Light Wraps You) // “Go tell the wave your pain’s abyss. She’ll likely listen and reply, and, maybe, even start to kiss.” (Anna Akhmatova) // “Creative people must not avoid the pain they get dealt. I say to myself, sometimes repeatedly “I’ve got to get the hell out of this hurt”… But no. Hurt must be examined like a plague”. (Anne Sexton, Letters)
