what i could never confess without some bravado by emily palermo // a song for a lover of long time ago - bon lver // lies about sea creatures by ada limón //cassandra: a novel and four essays by christa wolf // the next time we talk on facebook by clementine von radics // i bet on losing dogs - mitski // don’t know
1. A Primer for the Small Weird Loves - Richard Siken / 2. The Crane Wife - CJ Hauser / 3. Automat - Edward Hopper / 4. Red Doc> - Anne Carson / 5. Melancholy - Edvard Munch / 6. The Village (2004) / 7. So We Must Meet Apart - Gabrielle Bates and Jennifer S. Cheng
“And it seems I must always write you letters that I can never send.”
— Sylvia Plath
Memory taps a gun to your inner skull & demands you bring back the dead.
— Donte Collins, from "Grief, Again"
"I think of you with the most excruciating tenderness."
– Vladimir Nabokov
Though I may seem at times somewhat distant from you, through the gray mist of my own moods, I am never far; my thoughts always circle around you.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters
“I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.”
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”
— Sylvia Plath
Listen, I love you. It's that clear, that simple. And I know sometimes I can be a disappointment, that I rarely know what I want or think before I act, but you should know that in half a lifetime of spectacular messes, you are the very first thing that's felt right.
— Beau Taplin
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
[text ID: And so it seems I must always write you letters that I can never send.]
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
[text ID: Yesterday I advised you not to write me every day, I still hold the same opinion today and it would be very good for both of us, and so I repeat my advice today even more emphatically- only please, Milena, don't listen to me, and write me every day anyway, it can even be very brief, briefer than today's letters, just 2 lines, just one, just one word, but if I had to go without them I would suffer terribly.]
Blythe Baird, from If My Body Could Speak; “The way I was taught to love”
[Text ID: “Half daughter, / half apology, all fire and the wrong kind of love.”]
“I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.”
— Leonard Cohen
“Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to work out. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas, in centre stage, and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines, wondering why we no longer have a part, or want a part, in the whole damn thing. So everybody’s experienced this. When it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling goes from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain, which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.”
— Leonard Cohen on why people enjoy listening to melancholy songs (from a BBC radio interview in 2007)
