right now
it seems like no one in this place
wants to mean anything,
which is okay.
In my head I’m saying
in 300+ words,
I’m afraid and very hopeful.— Bianca Stone, from “Stenographer,” The Möbius Strip Club of Grief
Close
Of course I ate those seeds.
Who wouldn’t exchange
one hell for another?— Shara McCallum, from “Persephone Sets the Record Straight,” The Water Between Us
,,
These words are mine, these feelings mine, this belief mine.
Albert Camus, from Notebooks 1951-1959
(Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2008;
first published 1989)
,,
What sharp longing! What idiotic hope!
Tomas Tranströmer, from “Many Steps,”
New Collected Poems: Dikter och prosa 1954-2004
(Bloodaxe Books, 2015)
“how will I make use of this wound I carried like a map so that I would never, never lose you?”— Paul Guest, from In Praise of the Defective.
(via theroseofgazing)
the possibility of feeling something that hasn’t already been explained, spoken, cast in stone, pressed between the pages of language. the possibility of an experience so true it erases itself.
“The sensitivity of the innocent victim who suffers is like felt crime. True crime cannot be felt. The innocent victim who suffers knows the truth about his executioner, the executioner does not know it. The evil which the innocent victim feels in himself is in his executioner, but he is not sensible of the fact. The innocent victim can only know the evil in the form of suffering. That which is not felt by the criminal is his own crime. That which is not felt by the innocent victim is his own innocence. It is the innocent victim who can feel hell.”— Simone Weil (1909-1943), from “Evil”
in “Gravity and Grace”, translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr
(via theroseofgazing)
“I dreamed you were a lake and I was a little fish leaping / through the thin reeds of your throaty humming.”— Sean Thomas Dougherty, from “Dear Tiara,” Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA Editions, 2011)
(Source: thevaleofsoulmaking.wordpress.com, via theroseofgazing)
“It will be an annihilation. Alongside the ‘fullness’ of a presence, that ‘nothing’ constituted by an absence is astonishing – why can’t it be a contrary fullness?”— Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean-Paul Sarte, 14 Sept. 1939.
(via theroseofgazing)
Nothing was ever “nice” in my family.
They bear an intensity that allows
only for extremes:It’s always been either “You’re a genius!”
Or “You’re a Hitler.”— Bianca Stone, from “Interior Design,” The Möbius Strip Club of Grief