[deviika]

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

Underbelly, Nicole Homer

[ID: I loved someone / and I failed at it. Let me say it  another way: I like to call myself wound / but I will answer to knife.]

[malojasnake]

— To Raja Rao, by Czeslaw Milosz

[weltenwellen]

Mary Oliver, from “From the Book of Time”, Devotions

[weltenwellen]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours

[perfectquote]

“Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

[thoughtkick]

“You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in.”

— Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

[thoughtkick]

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[apoemaday]

First Memory

by Louise Glück

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was— for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

[primulaceas]

Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives

[antigonick]

“—it whispers into the water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.”

— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall 

[philosophybits]

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of every day life.”

— Berthold Auerbach, On the Heights

[perfectfeelings]

“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”

—

[amouthfulloflove]

“heart a door so heavy it hasn’t been opened in decades.”

— mouth (the task of a name), Uma Dwivedi

[amouthfulloflove]

“It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found when I saw it in your hands,”

— The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait tr. Carlos Fuentes

[ligeia-of-the-rhine]

““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that 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, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

[winelike]

Garrison Keillor, Supper