super succ @windowlit - Tumblr Blog

What happens to a woman at 19 at 25 at 29 can make her vulnerable to flight. First the tripwires drop away from my fingers. Next I’m learning the names for the parts of a bell. Eggs crack. A chalk line darts up my arm. Here I am as a hairpin curve. Here I am as cyanide stowed away in an apple seed.

Emily Skaja, “Elegy With Symptoms,” from Brute (via bostonpoetryslam)

#thisbe

mariamnamah

-Ibn al-Farid in his diwan

Derek Jarman, Chroma

I love everything you post so much! It's amazing. I was wondering if you had some quotes about gold, or in which gold is used as a metaphor.

“The golden girlwent bathing in the water,and the water turned gold.” (Lorca, ‘Qasida of the Golden Girl’)

“I see why in ancient times statues of the Buddha were gilt with gold and why gold leaf covered the walls of the homes of the nobility. Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold; but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value; for gold, in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Their use of gold leaf and gold dust was not mere extravagance. Its reflective properties were put to use as a source of illumination.” (Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows)

“… far more sweetsounding than alyre golder than gold …” (Sappho, If Not, Winter)

(Robert Frost, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’)

“But you know how I am. I push too hard. I get ahead of myself.I keep ruining everything I touch by turning it into gold.” (Richard Siken,‘The Long and Short of It’)

“the gold feeling.that lives off the coast of yourbody.that is solid.and seething with light.” (nayyirah waheed, ‘the auric coast’)

“I am the pool of goldWhen sunset burns and dies, —You are my deepening skies,Give me your stars to hold.” (Sara Teasdale, ‘Peace’)

(S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders)

“The light is astounding, a hammer. Horizon no closer, ever. Hills againchange color: gold and dark gold and darker gold. Whole fields are nothing but slabs of this gold soil, smashed up in chunks for cultivation, as if the massive altar at Castrogeriz had toppled straight across León.[…]Meseta colder than expected. Distances crushing. Horizon beats on the eyes. Everything is gold. I cannot describe the gold. I have shown you thephotographs (or have I?) but they don’t come near it.” (Anne Carson, excerpts from ‘An Essay on the Road to Compostela’ in Plainwater)

“I’m here and your eyes lucky. I’m here and your future lucky. Ha. God told me to tell you I’m pretty. Ha. My skin Midas-touch the buildings I walk by. Ha. Every day I’m alive the weather report say: Gold.” (Angel Nafis, ‘Gravity’)

(Dean Young, ‘Dear Friend’)

“And I say: wash the tarnished copper of your life from your hands;To be Love’s alchemist, you should be working with gold.” (Hafez, ‘School of Truth’)

“Wild honey smells of freedomThe dust - of sunlightThe mouth of a young girl, like a violetBut gold - smells of nothing.” (Anna Akhmatova, Untitled poem from Miscellaneous Poems 1943-1946)

“I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun. I am the mist of morning, the breath of evening. I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal, the rose and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance…” (Rumi)

(Anne Carson, excerpts from ‘An Essay on the Road to Compostela’ in Plainwater)

“Though I am old with wanderingThrough hollow lands and hilly lands,I will find out where she has gone,And kiss her lips and take her hands;And walk among long dappled grass,And pluck till time and times are done,The silver apples of the moon,The golden apples of the sun.” (W.B. Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’)

“You can’t see yourself all over. But I can. Part of you is honey, part of you is copper, some of you is gold…” (James Baldwin, Another Country)

(Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Hour’)

luthienne

“It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such.”

—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

—Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

—Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden

“They say I’m a beast. And feast on it. When all along I thought that’s what a woman was.”

—Sandra Cisneros, Loose Woman

“The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host - of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin - the Greeks didn’t know about dinosaurs - and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, looser, madness, arte, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession.”

—Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time; “Monstrous Mothers”

“I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”

—Anne Carson, Decreation

—Louise Glück, “Blue Rotunda”

“How can I teach her / some way of being human / that won’t destroy her?”

—Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“…and what I want to say / is that I am not what I was, I am / a changeling, half-creaturely,”

—Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems; “Wild Animals I Have Known”

“People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, the human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—”

—Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon

—Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems; “Index of Prohibited Images”

“She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal,”

—Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark: Stories; “Women’s Novels”

“…does she wander still, searching human faces / For one who might speak of her / In her own language, look into her eyes / And gentle the wildness once and for all?”

—May Sarton, Letters from Maine: New Poems

“How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.”

—Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; “The Lady of the House of Love”

—Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them”

—Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”

“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

—Ocean Vuong, “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”

“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.”

—Richard Siken, Spork’s Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone

“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil

“I was driven because I wanted to be like others. / I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.”

—Czeslaw Miłosz, “Account”

“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster?”

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?”

—Janice Lee, Daughter

#senelle #keep tag #i wanna do that thing where they put quotes and commentary in the metatext on each page LMAO