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

x "It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, cross currents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many."
— Margaret Atwood, from The Handmaid’s Tale (with thanks to blogut)

x "Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever."
— Sometimes, When the Light by Lisel Mueller
(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

x "When I hear violin music, I feel a painful clutch at my heart. I didn’t understand that pain. It’s my father playing the violin. I didn’t understand his death, I couldn’t accept it. But the blow hit hard, it left scars."
— Anna Kamieńska, from Industrious Amazement: A Notebook

x "It’s always like this.
I catch their scent and
old feelings come around."
— Xue Tao, excerpt from Peonies, translated by Jeanne Larsen (with thanks to pleasebebrave)

x "Faces appear, are washed away,
Dear today and tomorrow far off.
Why did I once turn down
the corner of this page?

Now the book always opens
To the same place. And then it’s strange:
It’s as if from the moment of farewell,
The years have not passed beyond recall."
— Anna Akhmatova, from “Imitation of I. F. Annensky” (translated by Judith Hemschemeyer)

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Mediation on Lagunitas by Robert Hass

x "Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, in Selected Poems (translated by S. Mitchell), thank you huong1952

pink blue and green by {manda}

Yes, me and Magnolia go way back…

x "You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ‘em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction - they’re all just fuel."
— from ‘After Dark’ by Haruki Murakami