what are some quotes that are so visceral they feel like a gut punch to you?
“A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.”
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
— Ilya Kaminsky, “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck”
“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, and who to love, and how to tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”
— Phoebe Waller-Bridge, from Fleabag
“Les femmes de notre famille, nous sommes engluées dans la colère
J’ai été en colère contre ma mère
Tout comme tu es en colère contre moi
Et tout comme ma mère fut en colère contre sa mère
Il faut casser le fil.”
(The women in our family are all stuck in anger
I have been angry at my mother
As you are angry with me
And as my mother was angry at her mother
The thread must be broken.)
— Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies
“I know what I want: an ugly, clean woman with large breasts, who tells me: what’s all this about making things up? I won’t have any dramas, come here immediately!—And she gives me a warm bath, dresses me in a white linen nightdress, braids my hair and puts me to bed, very cross, saying: well what do you want? you run wild, eating at odd times, you could get sick, stop making up tragedies, you think you’re such a big deal, drink this mug of hot broth. She lifts my head up with her hand, covers me with a big sheet, brushes a few strands of hair off my forehead, already white and fresh, and tells me before I fall asleep warmly: you’ll see how in no time your face is going to fill out, forget those harebrained ideas and be a good girl. Someone who takes me in like a humble dog, who opens the door for me, brushes me, feeds me, loves me severely like a dog, that’s all I want, like a dog, a child.”
“I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joana. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is warm and I am sad. But it is the sadness of happiness, this appeasement and sufficiency that leave the face placid, faraway. And when my child touches me he doesn’t rob me of my thoughts as others do. But later, when I give him milk with these fragile, beautiful breasts, my child will grow from my force and crush me with his life. He will distance himself from me and I will be the useless old mother. I won’t feel cheated. But defeated merely and I will say: I don’t know a thing, I am able to give birth to a child and I don’t know a thing. God will receive my humility and will say: I was able to give birth to the universe and I don’t know a thing.”
— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
“I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work.”
“I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh.”
“But when winter comes I give and give and give. The excess of me starts to hurt and when I’m excessive I have to give of myself.”
— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
“And that was what I felt when reading your book: that solitude.”
“Imagine the solitude of the person who wrote it.”
— Clarice Lispector, from an interview
“suppose the body did this to us,
made us afraid of love—”
— Louise Glück, “Crater Lake”
“When I put my hands on your body, on your flesh, I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake, but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency, leaving a gleaming skeleton, gleaming like ivory that slowly resolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight, the way your flesh occupies momentary space, the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth, to this present time, I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours, I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures, to reach up around my neck, to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.”
— David Wojnarowicz, from The Half-Life
“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
“and cain said, There’s an idea I can’t get out of my head, What’s that, said abraham, There must have been innocent people in sodom and in the other cities that were burned, If so, the lord would have kept the promise he made to make to save their lives, What about the children, said cain, surely the children were innocent, Oh my god, murmured abraham and his voice was like a groan, Yes, your god perhaps, but not theirs.”
“I’d like to jet-ski / straight out of this life because right now I am / way attached to real things like for instance / people how they are
all so tender how they / love to just go walk around and someof them are / wearing pink now and it hurts me and they / bathe their dogs”
— Heather Christle, “This Is Not The Body I Asked For”
“The idea of deserving love. And then watching love being given to people who did nothing to deserve it.”
— Anaïs Nin, from her journal
“And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child’s whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tendernesses, of fondnesses, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent’s reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
“The veals are the children of cows, are calves. They are locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home. The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends of how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”
“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“I know we’ve just met but I feel like maybe / you’d feed me and tuck me into your big bed / and only touch me as you covered me with the comforter.”
“The body has no thoughts.
The body soaks up love like a paper towel
— Kim Addonizio, “Body And Soul”
“I don’t know how God can bear / seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments and burnings, / the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts.”
— Kim Addonizio, “The Numbers”
“I keep wishing for you, keep shutting up my eyes and looking toward the sky, asking with all my might for you, and yet you do not come. I thought of you, until the world grew rounder than it sometimes is, and I broke several dishes.”
— Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Minnie Holland
“The unknowness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
“I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.”
“As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
“I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE”
— June Jordan, “Intifada Incantation: Poem 38 for b.b.L.”
“Maybe when I wake up in the middle of the night
I should go downstairs
dump the refrigerator contents on the floor
and stand there in the middle of the spilled milk
and the wasted butter spread beneath my dirty feet
writing poems
writing poems
maybe I just need to love myself myself and
anyway
I’m working on it”
— June Jordan, “Free Flight”
“It’s not that I gave away my keys. / The problem is nobody wants to steal me or my / house.”
— June Jordan, “Onesided Dialog”
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”
— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos
“I wept and wept. I had come to believe that if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it.”
— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name”
“You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. / Only the sun has come this close, only the sun.”
“It has to be perfect. It has to be irreproachable in every way. (...) To make up for it. To make up for the fact that it’s me.”
“I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard to make it love. I said no more severity. I said it severely and slept through all my appointments. I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad.”
— Richard Siken, Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper
“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero's shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
— Richard Siken, “Snow And Dirty Rain”
“Love, for you, / is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's / terrifying. No one / will ever want to sleep with you.”
— Richard Siken, “Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”
“The hardest thing still remains. It remains the hardest, to bear all the tenderness and only to gaze on.”
— Ilse Achinger, “Mirrorstory”
“i killed a plant once because i gave
it too much water. lord, i worry
that love is violence.”
— José Olivarez, “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains”
“Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen of lust,
bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.
Sometimes the men - they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men - they come with hammers.”
— Warsan Shire, “The House”
“I’ll take care of you. / It’s rotten work. / Not to me. Not if it’s you.”
— Euripides, Orestes, tr. Anne Carson
“We have this deep sadness between us and it spells so habitual I can’t tell it from love.”
— Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband
“There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is.”
— Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays
“I wish I could peel
all my sadness in one long strip off my skin
& toss it in a bucket. No one would have to carry it.
It would just sit there & be punished.
It would just sit there & think about everything it’s done.”
— Chen Chen, “Elegy For My Sadness”
“There is too much or not enough
room in my stomach
for everything we will do to each other.“
— Adriana Cloud, “Bento Body”
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