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[xu-an]

Why do you live in your body like you will be given another? As if it were temporary. You starve it, you let anyone touch it, you berate it. Tell it that it should be completely different. You tug at your soft flesh, wish it thinner, wish it gone. You fall in love with those who praise the way it sighs under their hands, but who praises the way it holds up your weight, even when you are falling apart?

Warsan Shire

[weltenwellen]

We break ourselves apart by trying to achieve complete perfectionism in everything we do.

Kelcey Zacarese

[yama-bato]

Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows. In my chest, a strange voice is awakens and a song plays inside me a longing that is not mine. They say that ancestors, dead before their time, with young blood still in their veins, with great passion in their blood, with the sun still burning in their blood come, come to continue to live within us their unfinished lives. Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows. O, who knows, soul of mine, in which chest you will sing you also, after centuries, in soft ropes of silence, on harps of obscurity - the drowned longing and the pleasure of living torn? Who knows? Who knows?

SILENCE

By Lucian Blaga

Translated by MariGoes

via

Also here

[xu-an]

“In this world we walk on the roof of hell gazing at flowers”

Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶)

[williamchapmanwritings]

”It’s hard to be yourself, when you don’t know who you are.”

William Chapman

[naomi-jarvis-blog]

In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don’t want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.

Pascal Mercier, "Night Train to Lisbon: A Novel"

[xu-an]

“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”

Warsan Shire

[xu-an]

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

Beryl Markham, "West with the Night"

[seabois]

The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Tender is the Night”

[xu-an]

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

[xu-an]

Fear Fear passes from man to man Unknowing, As one leaf passes its shudder To another. All at once the whole tree is trembling, And there is no sign of the wind.

Charles Simic, "Fear"

[xu-an]

As adults, we have many inhibitions against crying. We feel it is an expression of weakness, or femininity or of childishness. The person who is afraid to cry is afraid of pleasure. This is because the person who is afraid to cry holds himself together rigidly so that he won’t cry; that is, the rigid person is as afraid of pleasure as he is afraid to cry. In a situation of pleasure he will become anxious. As his tensions relax he will begin to tremble and shake, and he will attempt to control this trembling so as not to break down in tears. His anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between his desire to let go and his fear of letting go. This conflict will arise whenever the pleasure is strong enough to threaten his rigidity. Since rigidity develops as a means to block out painful sensations, the release of rigidity or the restoration of the natural motility of the body will bring these painful sensations to the fore. Somewhere in his unconscious the neurotic individual is aware that pleasure can evoke the repressed ghosts of the past. It could be that such a situation is responsible for the adage “No pleasure without pain.”

Alexander Lowen, "The Voice of the Body"

[xu-an]

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (Prologue, pt. III)

[xu-an]

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.

Bruno Latour

[xu-an]

When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other. Therefore the Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything. Things arise and she lets them come; things disappear and she lets them go. She has but doesn't possess, acts but doesn't expect. When her work is done, she forgets it. That is why it lasts forever.

Laozi (老子), Daodejing (道德經), Pt. II

[xu-an]

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being can hold.

Wislawa Szymborska, "The Three Oddest Words" (Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh)

[xu-an]

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh?" he whispered. "Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. "I just wanted to be sure of you.” "

A.A. Milne, "Winnie the Pooh"