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natalie diaz, from postcolonial love poem; “my brother, my wound” / (x) / anne carson from the beauty of the husband; “i dedicate this book to keats”

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Virginia Woolf’s signature

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I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery.

Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (via quotespile)

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“It is like losing a year of your life. To what would you lose a year of your life? Afterward, you go back to the old place— all that remains is char: blackness and emptiness. You think: how could I live here? But it was different then, even last summer. The earth behaved as though nothing could go wrong with it. One match was all it took. But at the right time—it had to be the right time. The field parched, dry— the deadness in place already so to speak.”

— Louise Glück, from Averno; “Landscape” (via luthienne)

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“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”

― Virginia Woolf, from The Years

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— anne carson, from the glass essay

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I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (via quotespile)

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tender quotes:

1.  “The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.” (mikko harvey, from “for m,”)

2.  “I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I’m holding out half to you.” (eileen myles)

3. “Wherever you are it’s okay. You can come back from it. Whatever happened to you down there, whatever the world looks like now, that’s not how it always looks. That’s not how it’s always going to look. There’s more. There’s always more.” (patrick ness, from “more than this”)

4.  “I was making dinner and I got a message. Go look outside, she said, go look at the sunset. My apartment is small, with four rooms and two windows that don’t see much light so I had no idea. I pulled my coat on and hurried out. I was running to this sunset, suddenly the only thing that mattered. I hurried past the taller buildings to the park and the sky was leaking shades of pink and purple. It was beautiful and fleeting, there one minute and gone the next. I would’ve missed it; I almost kissed it. And so I started thinking, how great it would be to get a nudge, a tap on your shoulder, a moment or two before your life changes. Stop what you’re doing and look around, you’ll want to remember this later. In a minute, you’re going to fall in love.” (kelsey danielle, from “unexpected sunset”)

5.  “Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another―why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.” (mary oliver, from “black oaks”)

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footnote to howl makes me crazy. thank you mister ginsberg

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Mary Oliver, from “Toad”, Truro Bear and Other Adventures : Poems and Essays

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I ask no more than to live a hundred years longer, that I may have more time to dwell the longer on your memory.

Jules Verne

(via macrolit)

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Louise Glück, from “Timor Mortis”, Poems 1962-2012

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Ocean Vuong, from Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

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Ugly, Bitter and True by Suzanne Rivecca

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Sue Zhao

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… those silences I moved in as a child, a shadow slinking through empty rooms …

…  how long before I’d make a dent? The point is not that when night fell 

there was barely a scratch. The point is how, armed with a feather, I believed I could make a mark.

— Angela Narciso Torres, from “Feather,” What Happens Is Neither