raised behind the altar, under oak and ash

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from Maud in “Tennyson: Poems”

@sankta-lucia 🥀

Margaret Atwood, from ‘Crickets’, The Door (2007)

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from The Complete Poems; "She Had Forgotten How The August Night," (edited)

— Anaïs Nin - Mirages, The Unexpurgated Diary

Eliza Griswold

James Baldwin talking about love

June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, "Consume me." That was at midsummer, after the garden party and my humiliation at the garden party. Wind and storm coloured July.

And it turns out that she doesn't want to be a teacher, or a scholar, or a librarian, or an editor, or to make television documentaries, or review books, or write articles. The list of things that she doesn't want to do is as long as your arm. Apparently she wants to do what she does—read, and go for walks, eat and drink with pleasure, tolerate some company. And unless people can value this about her—her withdrawals, her severe indolence (she has an air of indolence even when she's cooking an excellent dinner for thirty people)—they don't remain among the company she tolerates.

– Alice Munro, from “Oranges and Apples,” Friend of My Youth: Stories (Vintage, 1991)

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

Jeanette Winterson, from The Passion

– Lucie Brock-Broido, from “A Meadow”

the haunting of hill house, shirley jackson

Before falling asleep, before you fall asleep, we pass through each other like two ghosts in a marble room whose walls are hung with life-sized portraits of our ancestors […] and if it is true that we are shadows, then the people and the objects all around us here are nothing but the bones of shadows, the shadows of shadows.

— Gherasim Luca, The Passive Vampire, transl by Krzysztof Fijalkowski, (2008)

Leila Chatti, from "Postcard from Gone"

— Eileen Myles, “Universal Cycle.” The Importance of Being Iceland. (via llleighsmith)