@jameshobart / jameshobart.tumblr.com
H.D., from Collected Poems: 1912-1944; “Electra-Orestes,” (via mournfulroses)
“Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.”
Shilo Niziolek, “Porcelain Ghosts”
“I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn’t even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn’t talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.”
Yiwei Chai, The Jacaranda Years
“I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring”
— W.S. Merwin, from “The Love of October” (via theclassicsreader)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter from 21 October 1925 (via macrolit)
“these were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after i was gone. and i began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. the events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at same unpredictable time in the future. the price of what i came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”
— alice sebold, the lovely bones
i want to go home. i will always want to go home. even when i am at home i want to go home. but i’m not really thinking of a place, it’s more that feeling of everything finally being over, of seeing the light in the windows of your house on a cold night, of being safe, the relief of leaving a party you’re not enjoying, like when you felt sick at school and they sent you home, or when you got upset at a sleepover and they called your parents. i want my mam to come get me. i want to go home.
elizabeth wurtzel, prozac nation // lorde, ribs // maggie stiefvater, the dream thieves // billie marten, red sea blue sea
Catherine Lacey, “Cut” / Robin McKinley, Deerskin / Bruce Springsteen intro to “I’m on Fire” / Mary Ruefle, “Woodtangle” / Dick Lourie, “How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?”
Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath; entry no. 104
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (via theclassicsreader)
Heather O’Neill (thewalrus.ca/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-corpse)
carry me out:
West Wind, Mary Oliver/ Over the Town, Marc Chagall/ The Alchemy: Salt From Water, Carri Thurman/ Yu Fukagawa/ Song Of Myself, Walt Whitman
“I’m sick of it I’m sick of it sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick.”
Simone de Beauvoir, from “The Woman Destroyed,” published c. 1967
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (via notesfromtheundergroundman)
