ashtrayfloors:

“The most paradisiacal human trait is that we are inevitably surprised by death’s reality, despite its inevitability. The death of someone whom you love is a discovery of Death in the abstract as well as the particular: the appearance of disappearance, not only of the dead person, but of yourself. A quicksand pause: the absence of yourself from time. The sense of being ejected from time’s usual flow is common among the grieving, from my anecdotal polling. A writer who also lost a brother young, and violently, told me that at some point—he did not give a date or duration that must be exceeded—I would “rejoin time,” but, he added, if my experience turned out anything like his, some days, even decades later, would be “that first day after again.” Time, I suspect, will never move as it did before, even after I step back into it.”

— Elisa Gonzalez, from “Minor Resurrections: On failing to raise the dead” (The Point #28)

soracities:

ALT

Philip Larkin, from “Be my Valentine this Monday”, The Complete Poems [ID in ALT]

weusedtobegiants:

I want to go back to the beginning. We all do. I think: hurt won’t be there. But I’m wrong.

Gregory Orr, from Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved

exhaled-spirals:

“A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

— Milan Kundera, Slowness (via exhaled-spirals)

humanitysworld:

balkanparamo:

Girl with Pearl Earring, at the museum - Johannes Vermeer

soracities:

ALT

Yusef Komunyakaa, from “The Cage Walker”, Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems [ID in ALT]

mil4n0:

a-quiet-green-agreement:

You’re often anxious because you hate the feeling of the seconds slipping away from you. The world is changing every day. And every day you’re getting older. But there are still so many things you haven’t done. You want to hold on to the sand. But the harder you squeeze, the quicker the sand slips from the cracks between your fingers, until nothing is left…

– Chen Qiufan, from “The Fish of Lijiang,” Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation (Tor, 2018)

metaphorformetaphor:

“Words can cause trouble like large rocks in one’s path. Wrong: Words can clear the largest rocks out of the way. Wrong again: Words can turn into dark chasms unbridgeable for a whole lifetime. We know very little about the power and the destructiveness of words.”

— Tarjei Vesaas, from The Boat in the Evening (Peter Owen Publishers, 2003)

firstfullmoon:

ALT

ALT

Hanif Abdurraqib, in “Why this poet sees grief as its own kind of spiritual practice”

bookends68:

firstfullmoon:

“And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.”

— Robert Penn Warren, from Saturday Review (22 March 1958)

girlfictions:

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room / Bill Hader, on IT: Chapter Two

kitchen-light:

“The slightest alterations in translation can turn a girl into maid with few choices, a slave with none at all, or a slut who only has herself to blame. And it took a woman to see, or perhaps just care about, those differences. As it is we learn so little about Penelope’s δμωαί, their joys, their fears, and — with one exception, Melantho — even their names. The girls are at the mercy of the men in and the translator of the Odyssey. Who will tell their stories for them?”

— Yung In Chae, from her essay “Women Who Weave | Reading Emily Wilson’s Translation of the Odyssey With Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad”, published in Eidolon, November 16, 2017