#Currently reading

[gatheringbones]

[“Love or any deep connection with another person, however brief, does more than just satisfy us in the present. It ripples back in time, repairing, restoring, and renovating an inadequate past. Sincere love also sets off a forward-moving ripple and a resultant shift inside us. We get to the point where we can think: “Now I don’t have to need quite so much. Now I don’t have to blame my parents quite so much. Now I can receive love without craving more and more. I can have and be enough.” The person whose journey has progressed to that point is ready to love someone intimately.”]

david richo, from how to be an adult in relationships: the five keys to mindful loving, 2002

[smokedruid]

this is so mexican gothic ,,,, god i love mexican gothic

False halo

[flightlessfinch]

if you’re nosy like i am you might also love De Profundis by Oscar Wilde. it is essentially his break-up letter to his estranged lover who got him put in prison. i am 120 pages in & i am having the time of my life. it’s oscar wilde so it’s very profound but he also writes bitchy things like “You describe yourself, in your answer to Robbie, as being ‘deprived of all power of thought and expression.’ Indeed, apparently, you can think of nothing better than to write to your mother and complain.” and “Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I ‘attribute unworthy motives’ to you? Ah! You had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A motive is an intellectual aim.”

[academic-vampire]

The most relatable character in all of literature: Nora Helmer (-Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House).

(I think I’ve posted about this scene before already, but it’s just so funny every time I read it)

[sashkascekic]

Aleksandra Šćekić

[alextbphotography]

"Here I opened wide the door;– Darkness there, and nothing more." –Edgar Allan Poe 🍂 // all photos are mine 🌙

[godzilla-reads]

The three books I’m reading right now:

💚 Green Heart by Alice Hoffman

♥️ The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell

💙 The Servicebery by Robin Wall Kimmerer

[writtenroses1813]

I’m so sorry but in the nicest way possible do yall actually read books or just read words??? Cause I’ve been seeing that trend of people not understanding how “snarled” and “eyes darkened” and “eyes softened” etc. was used in a book and like…

Genuinely, do yall just not have imagination?? Or not understand figurative language??? Also eyes do literally darken and soften have you not lived a life??? How do you read with no imagination? Is this how you get through so many books in one month - you simply don’t take the time the understand the words as they are read?

[gatheringbones]

[“Sometimes, the abuse is so subtle that we fail to notice it. Sarcasm, ridicule, teasing, “kidding,” or continual criticism, for instance, starts to feel less like abuse and more like a part of the background noise. Sometimes one partner does not meet the other’s needs, but since he also does not do anything major to upset the apple cart, Adam and Eve go on in the relationship without thinking of options such as change or separation: He will never be so bad that you will leave him but never so good that he will satisfy you. In either case, we may fool ourselves into hoping for change rather than working for it.

If hope doesn’t include a plan for change, it is actually hopelessness and avoidance of change. What we do not change, we choose. Is this the message we get from the partner of our distress: “Stay with me and I won’t give you what you want,” or “Come back and I still won’t give you what you want”? We cannot be fooled forever. One day we allow ourselves to know and then take action.

Emily Dickinson, in her poem “’Tis not that dying hurts us so,” compares two kinds of birds in Massachusetts, those that stay the winter and those that migrate to warmer climes. She then says: “We are the birds that stay.” To be “the birds that stay” in wintry New England when wisdom would send us to Mexico is a cruel fate to impose upon ourselves. We can use it as a metaphor for a relationship in which we stay with someone who does not nurture us: we need a loaf and beg for a crumb from someone who’s afraid to give a loaf and hardly willing to give a crumb. To live in Massachusetts winter after winter and then say, “enough of this,” and move to California takes some pluck and then yields the warmth we hoped for. However, we may be conditioned to accept that our lives are not supposed to be comfortable. Likewise, we may believe that relationships will never work for us, that we are meant to be unhappy and unfulfilled. With that perspective, we may not be able to muster an “enough of this” when we find ourselves in pain. Instead we may ask ourselves, “Why bother?”

To live with abuse is dangerous because it can make our wish to suffer equal in strength to our will to be safe. We think, “Nothing I can do will stop him from hurting me,” or “Nothing I can do will make her love me.” A frightening conclusion can result: “Nothing matters, and I don’t care.” Such deep despair can take the form of poor self-esteem, disease, distortion of the body by overeating, self-abuse, addiction, risky jobs or hobbies, accident-proneness, anorexia, the belief that we can’t improve our lives, and so on. These all boil down to a wish to die. We might even seek relationships that guarantee protection against having to look at or process our issues. A partner may be appealing to us precisely because he implicitly promises that we will never have to confront, process, and resolve any issue very deeply, never have to change an intimacy-defeating style. We may think, “He is superficial and just as scared to confront things as I am, so I am safe here.” In such relationships we forge a tacit bargain to be what Emily Dickinson’s poem calls “Shiverers round Farmers’ doors” awaiting a “reluctant Crumb.”]

david richo, from how to be an adult in relationships: the five keys to mindful loving, 2002

[landsccape]

[cansu-m]

[bookishfreedom]

on todays episode of “there aren’t enough hours in the day to read all of the books i want”

[figtreeforever]

Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Caspar David Friedrich, Gartenterrasse, 1811

(Collage: instagram @emmalinatotes)

[herigo]

[academic-vampire]

𝔦𝔰 𝔦𝔱 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢 𝔞𝔩𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔡𝔶? 🍵