x "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,’ Didion writes. ‘We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.’ She ignores that to forget can be a supreme grace. I treasure all of the diaries I kept when I was a child precisely because of the distance I feel from the girl who wrote them. Seventh grade Alice: ‘It’s totally cool because it’s like we’ve moved on to another level of flirting.’ Eighth grade Alice: ‘You know I’ve been thinking way deep things lately.’ First grade Alice: ‘Dear Alice, I don’t know. Love, Alice.’ ”I have always been a person who is ‘sensitive,’ and I take too long to get over everything. Reading old journals and notebooks, I am reminded that feelings are, in their essence, immediate, and they pass over us like shadows. All the words I collect are artifacts of sentiments that do not exist and could not even be conceived of again—ideas that once desperately needed to be expressed disappear, leaving husks of language that I save, I care for."
— Alice Bolin, with thanks to leopoldgursky

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x "What killed her was the talk, the empty eyes,
which made her long for the one person in ten thousand
who could say her name in Russian,
who could take her home, giving her a place
between Auden and Apollinaire…"
— John Balaban, from “Anna Akhmatova Spends the Night on Miami Beach”, in Locusts at the Edge of Summer - thank you for sending me this, dear ahuntersheart

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It was a maiden journey that was to end in disaster for the Titanic’s passengers and crew. On 14 April 1912, at 11.40 pm, the Titanic struck an iceberg; three hours later, at 2.20 am, she sank, claiming over 1,500 lives. Little more than 700 passengers and crew survived the tragedy. (via guardian)

Although there are a lot more tragic events in both past and present history, this really got to me.

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(via lucette)

x "Does nobody understand?"
— James Joyce’s last words, January 1941

x "What is your favorite word?”
“And. It is so hopeful."
— Margaret Atwood

(Source: beinlovewithyourlife)

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The first page from the manuscript by Anna Magdalena Bach of Suite No. 1 in G major

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kingsley the cat by coffeestainsandcigarettes

Can I keep you?

x "Love, in whatever sense of the word we please, must surely be the principal theme of poetry. Even poems of loss and grief come to exist, almost always, because of the loss of, and the grieving for, someone or something—some moment or age or place that was once loved and is loved still."
— W. S. Merwin