March 2012
48 posts
“For months, I couldn’t write. It was the loveliest vertigo, sort of like...”
– havoc by Kristy Bowen (via grammatolatry)
“A work of art is abundant, spills out, gets drunk, sits up with you all night...”
– Jeanette Winterson
“Persuasive eloquence is the power to break in, to carry off, to seduce...”
– Jacques Derrida, Dissemination
“The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts.
It is important to...”
– “Ten Things I Know,” Richard Jackson (via clavicola)
“At 7:35 A.M, you lay your tired body on mine
before peeling off, like a slow...”
– Megan Falley, “What the Hour Hand Said to the Minute Hand” (via fleurishes)
“Don’t say it’s the beautiful
I praise. I praise the human,
gutted and rising.”
– Katie Ford, from “Song After Sadness” (via proustitute)
“Hair unbound, in this
hothouse of lovemaking,
perfumed with lilies,
I dread...”
– Yosano Akiko (via flyingodiva)
“There is no limit to the horizon, and nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even...”
– Virginia Woolf,Modern Fiction. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
“I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the...”
– A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (via shinjimoon)
“Wanting to make music
as if each note could be cut into shape;
as if an arm...”
– “Not the Blood a Dreamer Kissed from My Mouth,” Diane Wakoski (via shinjimoon)
“I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my...”
– ― Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (via sincerely-yoursnikkit)
“All night I hear
so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted
to look back, to...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
ahuntersheart:
“to go without comes naturally to me now, it costs me almost nothing anymore. I have let them go for so long, and so profoundly, that if you asked me about it I couldn’t say exactly what they were and if I really wanted them. Their place inside my head is empty. Even the sense of missing them has left no trace.” -From “Face” by Umberto Fiori. Translation by Alistair...
“Walking home across the plain in the dark.
And Linda crying. Again we have come...”
– “Walking Home Across The Island,” Jack Gilbert (via shinjimoon)
“Poetry is concerned with using and abusing, with losing with wanting, with...”
– Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, “Poetry and Grammar” (via semperaugustus)
“I have been thinking how the body
is a vulture—all avarice and need.
How...”
– Carol V. Davis, from “Need” (via proustitute)
The neurotic = the romantic
litbits:
“The more I explore neurosis, the more I become aware that it is a modern form of romanticism. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and if it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality, the power to imagine and not to sustain one’s endurance, and then the creative force turned into destruction.
“Many of the...
ahuntersheart:
Antonella Anedda:
“This is my understanding of writing: to write in order to disappear, so that life is revealed to me, without me, my face at last more blurred than the whiteness of the paper, bereft of reflection. A world where one can forget oneself. Not a mirror, but a stone.”
“Reality is not an enduring thing, it needs our protection. Buildings collapse, entire worlds...
“Only if I move my arm a certain way,
it comes back.
Or the way the light bends...”
– Jane Hirschfield, “To Hear the Falling World” in Of Gravity & Angels (via proustitute)
“Make love to me in Spanish.
Not with that other tongue.
I want you juntito a...”
– Sandra Cisneros, Dulzura (via fleurishes)
“What is your favorite word?”
“And. It is so hopeful.”
– An interview with Margaret Atwood (via beinlovewithyourlife)
“To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is...”
– Mary Oliver, from “In Blackwater Woods” (via proustitute)
ahuntersheart:
The Silk Road Epistles I stood by the road and smelled your skin on merchants and missionaries entering the city. You sent letters written in a celestial alphabet that confessed, Dear savage kisser, my heart is always. One day you arrived offering cocoons and mulberry leaves, and we sighed together in our mutual loneliness. I discovered your body split by a meridian of...
“That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (via awritersruminations)
“The blue river is gray at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and...”
– Jack Gilbert, “Waking at Night” (via apoetreflects)
“What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.”
– Miranda July (via clavicola)
ahuntersheart:
“Most days I long for perfection, for everyone to be safe. Maybe the only perfect thing in life is longing. Praise this beautiful, terrible world where we are opened and crushed, where the kiss comes from a mouth that bites.” -Melissa Stein, from “The Diver”
“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words,...”
– Virginia Woolf,The Waves. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
“I thought, please don’t grow
familiar. I think I said it out loud
...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
“I didn’t want to use the wrong words. I was afraid that words might betray it. I...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
“Run like hell my dear
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the...”
– Hafiz (via naturalprairie)
“I wanted to write “stay”
on your sides, surround
your bed with oceans
of...”
– (via grammatolatry)
“And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I...”
– (via shesinacoma)
“Brutal
for you to parade
in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.”...”
– (via proustitute)
“As though touching her
might make him known to himself,
as though his hand...”
– “Dwelling,” Li-Young Lee (via clavicola)
“A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache...”
– Excerpt from “The City In Which I Love You” by Li-Young Lee (via clavicola)
“How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you -...”
– Katherine Mansfield (via ode-to-silence)
“My mind
walks slowly across the abyss.
My mind thinks of itself as a...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
“"You know, they say that there is a part
of the human chest that if you strike...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
“… You could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.”
– Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (via clavicola)
“I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing,...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via proustitute)
“Can’t I live in poems?”
-Leonard Cohen, from “On The Sickness Of My Love”
– (via ahuntersheart)
“When my body had forgotten its purpose,
when it just hung off my brainstem like...”
– “December,” Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (via clavicola)
“I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
(43)
clavicola:
You didn’t know me when I was young enough to believe that you could bloom love like orchids on the kitchen table.
My father loved my mother the way Degas loved his ballerinas. He wanted to carve her out of marble, but forgot that statues don’t have heartbeats.
— only cold palms, and silk folds of stone.
How do you learn to love when you were never taught to as a...
A Working List of Things I Will Never Tell You by...
When I said I wasn’t with another girl the January after we fell in love for the 3rd time, it’s because it wasn’t actual sex. In the February that began our radio silence, it was actual sex. I hate the tight shirts that go below your waistline. Not only do they make you look too young, but then your torso is a giraffe’s neck attached to tiny legs. I screamed at myself in the subway for writing...
“If you stand
there long enough the air will thicken
with dusk and...”
– Philip Levine, from “How to Get There” (via proustitute) 