January 2011
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“Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That’s not an answer....”
– E. E. Cummings, “Forward to an Exhibit: II” (1945)
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“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that...”
– Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
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A question...
Thank you dontclick for your kind feedback (I accidentally deleted your message)! You asked me for a list of people I follow… Well, I meant to figure out how to post the whole list of people who I follow for a while and I hope this reduced list will suffice for now: lydianea, vaporeuse, aubade, umnie, juilett14, suchamajesty, autumnalhymn, beingabletofly, abrokensomething,...
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I Am Running Into a New Year
by Lucille Clifton
i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six even thirty-six but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me
from Good...
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“All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they...”
– Pale Fire (excerpt) by Vladimir Nabokov
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Voices
“Blood is thicker than water” so they say so you’ve said all these years when I was a child “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” so you told me all these years When it was Your Hand againstme and Your Word againstmine the sound of Your Voice silenced my own all these years.
*
But the whispers inside me grew into my own voice Blood isn’t thicker than water when diluted with tears and...
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“What can be explained is not poetry.”
– W.B. Yeats
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“Beneath the stains of time, the feelings disappear. You are someone else, I am...”
– Johnny Cash (via uber-alles)
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Shape by Sophie Hunger
Shadow boxing, monologue...
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The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
by Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no...
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“The truth is that among the knowers
I owned to a unique ignorance
and among...”
– The Tides (excerpt) from Memorial de Isla Negro by Pablo Neruda
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“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
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“This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is...”
– The Waking (excerpt) by Theodore Roethke
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(You are a dream, my love in taupe and yellow rays.) What is the making and the breaking of our lives, of our hearts, you asked me once And I could never say, I’ve seen so many days where I thought I would never wake but this dream of you. (Your taupe breath and your yellow mouth my hand in your hand You are my dream.)
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“I think I missed you before I met you even.”
– Francesca Lia Block (via vaporeuse)
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Kind words
lookingforsomethingiveneverseen: your blog is amazing. please keep posting and posting. thank you for going into the depths of your sources and finding all the lovely words for the feelings and thoughts that are so hard to describe. :)
kruczynski: This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.
I don’t even know what to say apart from that I really do appreciate such kind...
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“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people,...”
– Mary Olive, on “Staying Alive”, in Blue Pastures
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“Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your...”
– Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
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“I must learn to love the fool in me—the one who feels too much, talks too...”
– Theodore Isaac Rubin
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Desert Places
by Robert Frost
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it—it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is that loneliness Will be more...
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“Along with the pain there is a feeling of closeness, as though for once in my...”
– Haruki Murakami (via gatekeeper)
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“I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of...”
– Sonnet XVII (excerpt) by Pablo Neruda
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