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In my mind it’s you and I and we’re walking through Belleville, up that long hill, that we traversed so many times it almost felt as if we could say “we’re heading home” while feeling that pleasant sense of purpose and place. We’re holding our books from Shakespeare and Abbey books, we’ve gotten espresso, drank a glass of wine, put on make up and taken too many photos that we’ll never use for much. It’s eight months later, and that’s all I can do, reminisce - those photos - the tranquility of my first few days abroad - all was well, all was romantic. The moment of climbing a wall and breaking into a cemetery in Paris with that guy who had too big a crush on you and leaving with blood sweat and tears and walking home the morning after with a sense of bliss, the beauty of chance circumstances lining up in our favor

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Woman in Profile   -    Thomas Couture,    1860s

French ,1815-1879

oil on canvas

Baltimore Museum of Art Baltimore MD

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I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing […] But warm, eager, living life—to be rooted in life—to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less.

Katherine Mansfield, in a diary entry, featured in Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield (via minima--moralia)

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My old sense of reality seems displaced and I cannot quite anchor a new one —

Georgia O’Keeffe, in a letter to Jean Toomer, from Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (via luthienne)

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For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost   (via nemophilies)

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traveling lonely whilst not alone has my Europe trip... has too much time in the Spanish sun... relying on no one, responding to no one, being watched by no one made me too fiercely independent for my own good

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so many falls ago,  dreaming of the next

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Anne Sexton c. 1967, from “The Nude Swim,”

Water so clear you could read a book through it. Water so buoyant you could float on your elbow. I lay on it as on a divan. I lay on it just like Matisse’s Red Odalisque. Water was my strange flower, one must picture a woman without a toga or a scarf on a couch as deep as a tomb.

The walls of that grotto were everycolor blue and you said, ‘Look! Your eyes are seacolor. Look! Your eyes are skycolor.’ And my eyes shut down as if they were suddenly ashamed.

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I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” (via funeral)

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During the evening I would wander round the cafés or the little dance halls on the front. With utter indifference I let strangers sit down at my table and speak to me. I was so enchanted by the mild night air, and the lights, and the soft lapping of water, that nothing and no one could cause me annoyance.

Simone de Beauvoir, from The Prime of Life: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir; 1929-1944 (via violentwavesofemotion)

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In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Mary Oliver, from Upstream: Selected Essays (via pigmenting)

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golden hour