with love, rielle

𝒶𝑔𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓈𝑒𝓆𝓊𝒾𝓉𝓊𝓇 𝑒𝓈𝓈𝑒 21 | she/her

[xoxo-rielle]

Before your eyes you held steady the image of what you wanted me to become: living again. It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

– Margaret Atwood, An excerpt from Orpheus

[xoxo-rielle]

– C.P. Cavafy, An excerpt from Ithaka

[xoxo-rielle]

“What's your best discovery?" asked the mole.

"That I'm enough as I am," said the boy.

— Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse

[xoxo-rielle]

Here we are at the bottom. Almost empty. It's like confetti, these dried remnants you find in the street for a party no one invited you to. But they used to be, I can admit, part of something beautiful.

— Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

[xoxo-rielle]

What do I wish for? I want to love and be loved. Without suspicion, and with ease.

— Baek Sehee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

[xoxo-rielle]

I do not want to be admired. I do not want people, when I come in, to look up with admiration. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[xoxo-rielle]

And sometimes i have kept feelings to myself because I could find no language to describe them in.

– Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

[xoxo-rielle]

October was a beautiful month at Green Gables, when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths.

— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

[xoxo-rielle]

— Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things

[xoxo-rielle]

Never have I dealt with anything as difficult as my own soul,

which sometimes helps me and sometimes opposes me.

- Imam Al-Ghazali

[xoxo-rielle]

“I thought about it often; if it went back to its nest, if it kept looking if it kept singing… but more than anything, I hoped it passed away softly. Peacefully, in the middle of a dream.”

- Birdsong (2022), an animated short film by Michelle Cheng

[xoxo-rielle]

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson, Hope is the thing with feathers

[xoxo-rielle]

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked . . . I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar