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ADDRESSING these memoirs to you, my child, uncertain whether I shall ever have an opportunity of instructing you, many observations will probably flow from my heart, which only a mother—a mother schooled in misery, could make.

Mary Wollstonecraft, from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman

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Cy Twombly, Scenes from an Ideal Marriage, 1986

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If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever closed your legs to a man you loved opened them for one you didn’t moved against a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach seaweed clinging to your ankles paid good money for a bad haircut backed away from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled into the back seat for lack of a tampon if you swam across a river under rain sang using a dildo for a microphone stayed up to watch the moon eat the sun entire ripped out the stitches in your heart because why not if you think nothing & no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

To the Woman Crying Alone in the Next Stall, Kim Addonizio

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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No. Despite The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright Determined reverence of Sunday eyes. Picture Jehovah striding through the hall Of his importance, creatures running out From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout Appreciation of His merit’s glare. But who walks with Him?–dares to take His arm, To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear, Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer, Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool? Perhaps–who knows?–He tires of looking down. Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight. Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

the preacher ruminates behind the sermon, Gwendolyn Brooks

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Joseph Eskubi

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HOTELS

In the semidark we take everything off, love standing, inaudible; then we crawl into bed. You sleep with your head balled up in its dreams, I get up and sit in the chair with a warm beer, the lamp off. Looking down on a forested town in a snowfall I feel like a novel—dense and vivid, uncertain of the end—watching the bundled outlines of another woman another man hurrying toward the theater’s blue tubes of light. 

C.D. WRIGHT

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And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

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Only the light that falls continually from the sky gives a tree the energy to push powerful roots into the earth. The tree is actually rooted in the sky.

Simone Weil

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Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems; “Imaginary Paintings,” (x)

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Headwaters

I made a large mistake I left my house I went into the world it was not the most perilous hostile part but I couldn’t tell among the people there

who needed what no tracks in the snow no boot pointed toward me or away no snow as in my dooryard only the many currents of self-doubt I clung

to my own life raft I had room on it for only me you’re not surprised it grew smaller and smaller or maybe I grew larger and heavier

but don’t you think I’m doing better in this regard I try to do better

Ellen Bryant Voigt

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As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Audre Lorde, from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

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The Green Ray, 1986

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yannis ritsos

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To forgive. We cannot do this. When we are harmed by someone reactions are set up within us. The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. We must seek equilibrium on another plane. We have to go as far as this limit by ourselves. There we reach the void.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 7 (via weil-weil)

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Гигантский снеговик, 1966