George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard from, “Summer Solstice.”
“Once someone touched my jaw so softly I cried. Once someone held my hand so lightly I wept —”
— Sanna Wani, from “Meditation”, My Grief, the Sun
“Let everything that’s been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”
Andrei Tarkovsky - The Sacrifice - ( 1986 )
Source: vethox
“Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.”
— John Berger (via mesogeios)
“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.”
— Oscar Wilde (via wordsnquotes)
Source: wordsnquotes.com
Oscar Wilde’s Lipstick-Covered Tomb | Via
The practice started in the late 1990s, when somebody decided to leave a lipstick kiss on the tomb. Since then lipstick kisses and hearts have been joined by a rash of red graffiti containing expressions of love, such as: “Wilde child we remember you”, “Keep looking at the stars” and “Real beauty ends where intellect begins”. Kissing Oscar’s tomb on the Paris tourist circuit has become a cult pastime.
A fine of €9,000 ($12,000) was imposed on anyone caught kissing or damaging the historical monument, but it had no effect. It was hard to catch people in the act, and most culprits were tourists who were long gone before the police could bring them to court. Appeals from Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland to stop the practice also fell on deaf ears. A plaque asking fans to respect the tomb instead of defacing it went in vain.
Meanwhile, those greasy red lipstick stains seeped into the stone making it harder and harder to clean. Every cleaning eroded a layer of stone rendering it even more porous, so the next cleaning had to go even deeper and wear away the stone even more.
philip-ham
I have no idea why anyone would believe Oscar Wilde isn’t delighted by this.
What she says: I'm fine.
What she means: In the first chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Henry says that yes, he is an immoral influence, because all influence is immoral as it is inauthentic and unnatural. If Dorian as he becomes may be said to be a product of the things Henry has said, then Dorian is inherently evil by Henry's own definition regardless of whatever else he does. In the first chapter Henry also says that he "likes persons without principles better than anything else in the world." Since Dorian has no principles, Henry loves him, and it thus follows that Henry loves evil. He makes no claims to the contrary, in fact he repeatedly makes references to his lack of morals. But that's not quite true-- never once in the entire book does Henry do anything actively harmful, he only stands on the sidelines and offers encouragement. It's not clear that he even comprehends the extent to which Dorian is a true monster. He pretends at being amoral and immoral but doesn't have it in him to do the things that Dorian has nerve to do. He is a pretender, and man acting a part not written for him and thus, by his own logic, immoral. But if he is immoral, then he is not pretending at being immoral. If he is not pretending at something, then he is not immoral. The moral of The Picture of Dorian Gray is that Edgelords (TM) are as evil as they say they are while at the same time being sinless by virtue of having sinned. The secondary moral is that Lord Henry Wotton is a pretentious idiot.
“I miss you, my love, and have such a need to see you. Solitude may well be of benefit to me, but how hard your absence is for me! I long for your little face, your voice, your gestures, and your tenderness. I’m quite melting with tenderness for you today — and it’s painful.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, from Letters To Sartre (via violentwavesofemotion)
THE LESSON OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS, OF GREEK TRAGEDY, AND ULTIMATELY, OF ALL RELIGIONS, IS THAT THERE IS AN INSTINCTIVE TENDENCY TOWARDS DIVINE INTOXICATION WHICH THE RATIONAL WORLD OF CALCULATION CANNOT BEAR.* IF YOURE LISTENING!! IF YOU EVEN CARE!!!!
*Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil
Anonymous asked:
Your blog's *chef's kiss* and I wish to ask do you have any quotes or what comes to mind when it comes to love mingled with grief/pain? Like losing someone at the stinging cost of the other? Or looking at a completed wonderful thing but knowing the pain and blood it stands on to be that way? Or when you look at someone realizing you now share hearts whether youd like it or not, that no bond in both your lives will ever come close to what both of you have(1)
how the love stiches both of you up, how achingly tender & vulnerable & warming it is and almost crying looking at where it is, how it is, what it became and what it grew from. Would love to hear if you got any that pops to your mind❤(2)
you are so kind! thank you, angel ♡ here and here are posts that reflect love mingled w grief/pain and tender/sweet love. here are a few more quotes that sort of encompass both for me:
“Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that.”
James Joyce, Exiles: A Play In Three Acts
“We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning — clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again. I awakened from my trance state and was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness had become the order of the day. I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood. Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love. Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.”
Bell Hooks, All About Love
“My heart is full not of guilt, or shame, or remorse, but of grief… Everything has become too terribly mixed up.”
Boris Pasternak, in a letter to Leonid Pasternak, from Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke
Jamie Anderson // Art piece by Ikenaga Yasunari (x)
“But if it’s love, by God, what is this thing? If good, why then the bitter mortal sting?”
Petrarch, from the ‘Canzoniere’ (tr. Mark Musa)
“bittersweet, undefeated creature – against you there is no defence”
Sappho, from Poems and Fragments (tr. Josephine Palmer)
“And if I should pick out the good in you – each shard of broken light, like glass from the wreck of such beauty, and look at that – or one golden afternoon when you hovered above me in rapture, oh half god – how would I bear to lift my hands, how would I bear to close my eyes and let you fall, and love be damned?”
Cecilia Woloch, “Lucifer, Full of Light,” Carpathia
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “The Good Fight”
“...and if I cut myself, it was you I bled.”
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”
Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
Henry Dumas, Knees of a Natural Man; “Valentines”
“No te nombro; pero estás en mí como la música en la garganta del ruiseñor aunque no esté cantando.
I never call your name, but you are in me like the song in the nightingale’s throat even when it’s not singing.”
Dulce María Loynaz, Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems; “Poema LVII” (tr. James O’Connor)
Marguerite Duras - India Song (1975)
“I am sad because I love you, because I love you so much, and because I am not a bee to buzz with you lightly. I am not a flower, not a tree, not a rain-hewn stone. I am not a storm or a cresting wave, not a thorn or a vine. I am not the sun stinging the water, not the moon on the snow. I am not a star in the dark. I am not the dew-wet wind, not the cloud-stained dawn. I am only a girl, a small, plain girl, a girl who must smear her lips in honey to be found sweet.”
Amal El-Mohtar, The Honey Month
“Whether it was the quality of light or the clarity of my feelings for you, I don’t know, but there was softness and no blurring. ‘This is not a lie,’ I said to myself. ‘It may not hold, but it is true.’”
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
“He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.”
Louise Glück, from Averno; "A Myth of Devotion"
Anna Akhmatova, Final Meeting: Selected Poetry (tr. Andrey Kneller)
“Your dying is my dying. / In you I exist—to live or not.”
Euripedes, from Alkestis (tr. Anne Carson)
Richard Siken, “Scheherazade”
“First love tempts / then puts out our eyes.”
Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyusi, from ‘Dearest love - III’ (ed. Charles Doria), Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women (ed. Kamal Boullata)
Interactive :: House Saints by Hala Alyan
“We were the heartbreak of truth. / We were willing to break even more.”
Andrea Gibson, from The Madness Vase; “Close For Comfort”
“God, what are you doing to me? / What am I doing to myself?”
Adonis, from ‘Concerto for the Veiled Christ’, Selected Poems (tr. Khaled Mattawa)
“No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet – might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them?”
Angela Carter, from “The Bloody Chamber”
“It is true we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Keaton Henson, “Alright”
Velimir Khlebnikov, The Collected Poems & Writings of V. K. “My Darling,”
“But love is impossible and it goes on / despite the impossible. You’re the muscle / I cut from the bone and still the bone / remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants) / the flesh back, the real thing, / if only to rail against it, if only / to argue and fight, if only to miss / a solve-able absence.”
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “In A Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me”
The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas, tr. by Martha Zamora
Letter to Diego Rivera, July 23rd, 1935
“I want to give you everything. This is called a sickness.”
Camille Rankine, from Possession
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; ‘Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehen’, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
“Love that incorporates, that devours the other person, that cuts the tendons of the will. Love as immolation of the self.”
Susan Sontag, from Reborn: “July, 1958”
hi, I was the anon who asked if you knew any quotes for loneliness, I feel like I need it like air to breathe but at the same time it drowns me. It doesn't have to be quotes, it could be your take on it. You have any advice to not drown in my solitude and isolation? (lots of love btw I love your blog so much)
hi ♡ it’s easy to fall into a cycle of isolation and solitude that eventually turns into something lonely and parasitic. just feeding off of itself and only breeding more loneliness and desire to be alone. i don’t know what the cure is. maybe it’s intentionally seeking out connection—connection with other people, with art, with music, with nature, with something bigger than ourselves; something real that takes us out of our solitude even just a little bit, something that gives us a wholesome connection with the world. maybe that’s planting trees or seeds or connecting w elderly care facilities and having regular phone calls w some of our lonely elders. maybe it’s getting involved w something you believe in. i think that loneliness comes in many forms... sometimes it seems like nothing and no one can make it better. in those cases i think about that may sarton poem:
and a few more excerpts:
(Loneliness deepened by being a loner. Everyone else must be asleep for me to feel that I am not asleep.)
Marina Tsvetaeva, from Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke
Olga Broumas, from Beginning with O
“Your loneliness is precious to you, I know. Does it disturb you to know you are dear to me? Do not let it. It is such a quiet feeling. It is like the light coming into a room—moonlight—”
Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to J.M. Murry
“…it is a little thing to say how lone it is — anyone can do it, but to wear the loneliness next your heart for weeks, when you sleep, and when you wake, ever missing something, this, all cannot say, and it baffles me.”
Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Gilbert (Dickinson)
Nikki Giovanni, “Sometimes”
“But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are.”
Ryan O’Connell
“every day / a kind of drowning—”
Zeina Hashem Beck, from “I Dreamt We Threw Bread Crumbs,” Louder Than Hearts: Poems (Bauhan Pub, 2017)
“he watched and he listened, he asked nothing of anyone, and no one asked anything of him, the silence within him became immutable and this silence around him became irrevocable”
László Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below (trans. Ottilie Muzlet)
Jack Gilbert, “The Abandoned Valley”
“I remembered the scent of loneliness / in my coat left draped over the chair. / I had fallen in love with its cut, / how it made me walk straighter.”
Yusef Komunyakaa, from The Chameleon Couch
“It’s so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it… I want sensuality and sensitivity, both… Let me never deny that… I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments.”
Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Clarice Lispector, “Excerpt”, Collected Stories (trans. Katrina Dodson)
“Maybe who you have to set free first is yourself. That is a very tricky one. I do know about loneliness though I’ve long since outgrown it. It is a bad taskmaster, leading one into endless mistakes.”
Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters
May Sarton, The Journals of May Sarton Volume One
Ocean Vuong, from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”
Nikki Giovanni, from “When I Die”
Margarita Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, Rien ne va plus
Tomas Tranströmer, tr. by Robert Bly, from a poem titled “Track,”
Aracelis Girmay, “Elegy”
Yosa Buson, tr. by Cheryl A. Crowley
Anonymous asked:
Hello. I was wondering if you possibly knew of some poems about sleeping/lying with/being close to someone? When I try a search I’m just finding poems about literal sleep and I’m looking more for poems about closeness I guess?? Thank you!
“I want to sleep with you, fall asleep and sleep. That magnificent folk word, how deep, how true, how unequivocal, how exactly what it says. Just—sleep. And nothing more. No, one more thing: my head buried in your left shoulder, my arm around your right one—and that’s all. No, another thing: and know right into the deepest sleep that it is you.”
— marina tsvetaeva, in a letter to rilke, from letters summer 1926
— nikki giovanni, from “ever want to crawl”
“I’m thinking when awake, how sweet if you were with me, and to talk with you as I fall asleep, would be sweeter still.”
— emily dickinson, in a letter to susan gilbert (dickinson)
— franz kafka, from letters to milena
“it were comfort forever – just to look in your face, while you looked in mine –”
emily dickinson, from the master letters of emily dickinson
— hope gangloff, clothes swap, brooklyn
“When I think of little flowers that grow in grass, and little streams and places where we can lie and look up at the clouds—oh, I simply ache for them—for them with you.”
— katherine mansfield, in a letter to j.m. murry, feb 20, 1918
“Maybe i’m getting tired – I can’t think of anything but nights with you. I want them warm and silvery.”
— zelda fitzgerald, “letter to f. scott fitzgerald,” may 1919
— tove jansson writing to tuulikki pietilä, 1957
“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. with him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.”
— chimamanda ngozi adichie, americanah
“It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. and I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”
— vladimir nabokov, from letters to vera
“There you are, and I am very glad of it. You have never done anything to me that was not good; I love you tenderly.
— gustave flaubert, in a letter to george sand, 1876
— holly warburton, study of a couple
“I’m tired and all I want is for you to be here with me.”
— t.b. laberge, the novel of us
“Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows, with only this one dream: you come too.”
— rainer maria rilke, from “pathways”
“Stop. You don’t love him. You love the idea of him, the concept of someone who will fill the void of your bed and kiss your scars back into your skin. You crave salvation, I can’t blame you for that. But you won’t find it in his stale words, rehearsed and abused on his stagnant tongue. No, no. Your saving grace is somewhere inside that scar tissue you’re so desperate to peel from your body.”
—
Forgive me if I loved you so violently
and so madly,
for violence is my weapon to write
and my weapon when I love. And madness is the last gold ring
I place on your fingers.
Nizar Qabbani, tr. by Nayef al-Kalali, from Republic of Love: Selected Poems; “Love of 1994”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; ‘Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehen’, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
[ID: text reads: Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. / Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. / And without feet I can make my way to you, / without a mouth I can swear your name. // Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you / with my heart as with a hand. / Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. / And if you consume my brain with fire, / I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood. /end ID]
can't believe we've all been here since we were 14 and now we're all 20000 years old
Hiddlesweek Day 4: Physical Attributes
FRECKLES
I’m sorry, I had to do it…
(Pics and gifs not mine)
no apologies necessary
snugglyhiddles
Oh yes, yes, yes. I want to ravish this man. My morning has officially been made. Take a look, lovelies.
Like a popsicle… *slurp*
This is not helping me get anything productive done…
