shesbeenmarooned

[shesbeenmarooned]

As I was staring at the void in front of me, a touch — immediately violent and excessive — joined me to that void. I saw that void and saw nothing, but it, the void, was embracing me.

Georges Bataille, "The Roof of the Temple" from The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille (trans. Mark Spitzer)

[shesbeenmarooned]

I let myself be absorbed into this unutterable barrenness—into this black night hour of the being's core no less a desert nor less hostile than the empty skies.

Georges Bataille, 'Madame Edwarda' (trans. Austryn Wainhouse)

[shesbeenmarooned]

Terror on the edge of the grave is divine and I sink into the terror whose child I am.

Georges Bataille, 'My Mother' (trans. Austryn Wainhouse)

[shesbeenmarooned]

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”

— Andre Breton

[shesbeenmarooned]

...an emptiness opened inside her, a prolonged shudder went through her, and bore her upward like an angel.

Georges Bataille, 'The Dead Man' (trans. Austryn Wainhouse)

[shesbeenmarooned]

Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world.

Georges Bataille, The Impossible (trans. Robert Hurley)

[shesbeenmarooned]

Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.

Georges Bataille, Eroticism (trans. Mary Dalwood)

[shesbeenmarooned]

My blood is on fire: stay, I will be your shelter for a night of dreams.

Yosano Akiko, Tangled Hair (trans. Dennis Maloney and Hide Oshiro)

[shesbeenmarooned]

In a flash, all that I had loved during my life rose up like a graveyard of white tombs, in a lunar, spectral light.

— Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, transl by Harry Mathews, (2012)

[shesbeenmarooned]

“I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[shesbeenmarooned]

“But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.”

— John Steinbeck, from Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

[shesbeenmarooned]

Our Blushing Brides (1930)

[shesbeenmarooned]

Tennessee Williams, from "The Glass Menagerie," originally published in 1944

[shesbeenmarooned]

What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel?

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

[shesbeenmarooned]

“‘You are a strange child, Miss Jane,’ she said, as she looked down at me; 'a little roving, solitary thing.’”

— Charlotte Brontë, excerpt from Jane Eyre

[shesbeenmarooned]

“Or, perhaps, more than all these, something in her own unique mind, had roused her powers within her. They woke, they kindled: first, they glowed in the bright tint of her cheek, which till this hour I had never seen but pale and bloodless; then they shone in the liquid lustre of her eyes, which had suddenly acquired a beauty more singular than that of Miss Temple's–a beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance. Then her soul sat on her lips, and language flowed, from what source I cannot tell. Has a girl of fourteen a heart large enough, vigorous enough, to hold the swelling spring of pure, full, fervid eloquence? Such was the characteristic of Helen’s discourse on that, to me, memorable evening; her spirit seemed hastening to live within a very brief span as much as many live during a protracted existence.”

— Charlotte Brontë, excerpt from Jane Eyre

[shesbeenmarooned]

“Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre? Don’t trouble yourself to answer–I see you laugh rarely; but you can laugh very merrily: believe me, you are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious. The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man and a brother–or father, or master, or what you will–to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.”

— Charlotte Brontë, excerpt from Jane Eyre