“I myself am an absolute abyss.”
- Antonin Artaud, as quoted in The Diary of Anais Nin
“I myself am war.”
- Georges Bataille, Acéphale
salemwitchtrials
‘Skunk Hour,’ Robert Lowell
“I wish that photographs were physical spaces, like tunnels; that you could crawl inside them and go back.”
— Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls
Source: booksnquotes.com
“So: what’s your story? When you’re alone, when it’s quiet and your mind wanders, what surfaces, over and over despite your best efforts? Psychologists call these ‘intrusive memories,’ the invisible switchboard operations that ensure we never get over our childhoods. I call them ‘golden stories.’ Not because they’re pleasant, necessarily, but because they burn bright.
Imagine that every one of your memories is represented by a Polaroid in a photo album. Flip through the album, and you’ll find that some of the Polaroids are faded, unrecognizable, but others burn bright. These are the golden stories. It doesn’t matter if they’re fragmented or confusing or strange or blissful or even wrong. Maybe it’s a whispered conversation between your parents that you overheard at twelve years old, yet your parents swear that conversation never took place. Still, the memory surfaces.
Our golden stories are rich with emotional consequence, which is why our bodies preserve them as precious matter. What is memory, after all, but the most devoted of teachers, nudging us backward so that we may move forward as fuller, more aware human beings?”
Felicia Rose Chavez, from “The Mental Load,” Brevity (no. 57, January 2018)
Nefelibata (n.) lit. “cloud walker” ; one who lives in the clouds of their own imagination or dreams. One who is not confined nor defined by the conventions of society, literature, or art.
Source: undomielle
books-n-quotes
Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free.
Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes (via books-n-quotes)
Source: booksnquotes.com
Don’t allow for your talents to go to waste. You must use them. Work on them. Improve them. Show the world what it is that you bring to this universe; whether it be in pounding crowds, or the subtlety of silence.
Nicole Addison @thepowerwithin (via thepowerwithin)
“Artists are divided into those who create their own inner world, and those who recreate reality. I undoubtedly belong to the first–but that actually alters nothing: my inner world may be of interest to some, others will be left cold or even irritated by it; the point is that the inner world created by cinematic means always has to be taken as reality, as it were objectively established in the immediacy of the recorded moment.”
Andrei Tarkovsky, from “The film image,” Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (University of Texas Press, 1987)
Like thunder and lightning,
she is beautiful, yet frightening.
…storms don’t scare me (via nrswriting)
Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish—to let others vanish— without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art.
Edward Hirsch, from How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Harvest Books, 1999)
violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell. I’ve lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
Jeanette Winterson, from “Gut Symmetries,” published c. 1998 (via violentwavesofemotion)
