[fruitffish-deactivated20250218]

Excerpts for a 1920's newspaper during the Spanish Flu

[leolove4ever]

[fazers]

[deseos-de-la-via-lactea]

instagram

[qvotable]

“I missed you in a small way. Tiny enough to fold up and put in my pocket, and carry that loneliness with me everywhere I went. I’d forget all about you, until my hand accidentally brushed against that slip of memory.”

— Unknown

[parisianqueen-deactivated202004]

During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

[maraeffect]

poor people deserve things they want, too. it is unfair to expect poor people to only buy things they “need”.

[enide-s-dear]

My grandfather used to tell me: if you only have 20 kr left, you buy grocery for 10 kr and flowers for the other 10 kr because you need a reason to live as well.

[rebakitt3n]

“If I had but two loaves of bread I would sell one of them & buy White Hyacinths to feed my soul.” - Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

[cybergata]

This little girl loves her human enough to follow him in places kittens don’t go.

[feministism]

[stimman3000]

.

[static-behind-green-eyes]

That’s such a hauntingly beautiful sound.

[petrichour]

“…it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

[petrichour]

“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

[punlovsin]

Love in moderation is as dull as a chaste kiss, open your mouth, drink life whole…

Lord Byron (via leetaeminandguns)

[eligracely]

I promise to plant kisses like seeds on your body, so in time you can grow to love yourself as I love you.

Tyler Knott Gregson, Chasers of the Light (via egracely)

[sleepingpigeon]

no one wants to hear it but love is earned after the initial infatuation. commitment is something u both mutually agree to and then from there it’s work. it’s not work like it’s a chore it’s jus work like it takes effort. to get good at these things takes practice. it takes practice to learn to communicate better and it takes practice to learn to love each other in the ways u need to be loved.

[lifeinpoetry]

“I am all out of pity / and gods to please you with”

— Jennifer Rouse, from “III.,” Riding with Anne Sexton

[mesogeios]

“Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

[mesogeios]

“It is significant that the word ‘passion’ and the word ‘passive’ share the same root in the Latin word for ‘suffering’ (passio). To be passive is to be enacted upon, as a negation that is already felt as suffering. The fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others. Softness is narrated as a proneness to injury. The association between passion and passivity is instructive. It works as a reminder of how ‘emotion’ has been viewed as ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason. To be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous. Feminist philosophers have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body. Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement.”

— Sara Ahmed, The Culture Politics of Emotion,

[aaaxaiiaiais]

There’s so much to read that one life isn’t enough.