#excerpts

[secretsiwhispertothemoon]

Frida Kahlo, from a letter wr. c. November 1933, featured in The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas

[inkpressedpetals]

[reader-twisted]

“It was an act of self-preservation — however misguided it was”.

[scriptastra]

[feral-ballad]

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Instructions for Traveling West”

[Text ID: “you’re homesick / for all the lives / you’re not living.”]

[funeral]

Identification with one's office or one's title is very attractive indeed, which is precisely why so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind this husk. Underneath all the padding one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office—or whatever this outer husk may be—is so attractive, providing, as it does, cheap compensation for personal inadequacies. We all of us know the professor whose whole individuality is exhausted by his professional role; behind the mask, we find nothing but peevishness and infantilism.

Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[spectrenun]

Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

[imvinia]

Excerpt from Lament for the Girl They Remember.

- Ruby Attard, Devotion & Desecration

[melusinae]

louisa may alcott, little women.

[secretsiwhispertothemoon]

Joseph Brodsky, translated by Howard Moss, from a poem titled "I Sit By The Window,"

[inkpressedpetals]

[literaryvein]

L. V., excerpts from a past life

[scriptastra]

[bbeaniee]

J.T., roses for every day I loved you