burythereadwiththeread

[burythereadwiththeread]

How to Be a Poet BY WENDELL BERRY

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

[burythereadwiththeread]

Feeding the Worms by Danusha Laméris

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

[burythereadwiththeread]

'The postcolonial?' he'd asked. 'Is that a real thing? Isn't it just a category of discrimination that rich kids from the third world like to claim when we find ourselves here, in America, in the academy, and we want tenure or something like that? It's nice to feel oppressed. Then we don't have to face the fact that back home we are actually the oppressors.'

-Kei Miller, "Mr Brown, Mrs White, and Ms Black" Things I Have Withheld

[burythereadwiththeread]

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say

-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

[burythereadwiththeread]

The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.

-Albert Camus

[burythereadwiththeread]

"Whatever you do won't be enough, I heard their voices say. Try anyway."

-Barack Obama, A Promised Land

[burythereadwiththeread]

"When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen."

-Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

[burythereadwiththeread]

"We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite."

-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

[burythereadwiththeread]

“Would that we all knew the cracked terrain of each other’s broken hearts. Perhaps then, we would not be so cruel to those who walk this lonely world with us.” 

-Sabaa Tahir, A Sky Beyond the Storm 

[burythereadwiththeread]

“for you to see beauty here does not mean there is beauty in me it means there is beauty rooted so deep within you you can’t help but see it everywhere”

-Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey  

[burythereadwiththeread]

“These are the words of a man...But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit only goes to the name on the cover.” 

-V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

[burythereadwiththeread]

“Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.” 

-V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue 

[burythereadwiththeread]

“Don’t lock yourself away from those who care about you because you think you’ll hurt them or--or they’ll hurt you. What point is there in being human if you don’t let yourself feel anything?” 

-Sabaa Tahir, A Torch Against the Night 

[burythereadwiththeread]

Hate diet culture so much bitches will b like “don’t eat processed carbs they’re so bad for you” like and??? So what?? God did not give us grain and stone to grind it with for no reason. Bread is inevitable. Bread is food for the heart and the soul. U think I’m gonna give that up in pursuit of instagram fitness?? U think I’m gonna deny myself the simple pleasure of toast with jam so I can endlessly chase an ever-shifting standard of beauty that ultimately means nothing? In 20 years I will no longer be beautiful and in 60 my body will be vacant food for other, smaller creatures. But the taste of fresh bread? Of homemade donuts and still-warm pie? I will carry the taste on my tongue into whatever follows this life. So like. Stop telling me I should diet lmao. I’m not abt to martyr myself just to get a man to look at me.

[burythereadwiththeread]

“I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.” 

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves 

[burythereadwiththeread]

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.” 

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[burythereadwiththeread]

“There can be no doubt...that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love.” 

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves