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J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Return of the King

[text: September came in with golden days and silver nights,]

D.M. Aderibigbe, from “Letter from My Father, Odysseus”

[text: my fingers in these wounds / from the past.]

[text: All morning it has been raining. In the language of the garden, this is happiness.]

Ocean Vuong, The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation

[text: "I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night - we can live. And we will."]

Louise Glück, from "Landscape", Averno

[text: It was a time of waiting, of suspended action.

I lived in the present, which was that part of the future you could see. The past floated above my head, like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable.

It was a time governed by contradictions, as in I felt nothing and I was afraid.]

[text: To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.]

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

[text: But if there is deep love involved, there is deep responsibility toward it. We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.]

 Andrea Gibson, You Better Be Lightning

[text: There are many days I thirst for my own silence]

Holly Black, The Prisoner's Throne

[text: "I want," she says. "That's my problem. I want and I want and I want."

"What do you want?" he asks, voice soft.

"Everything. Charm me. Rip me open. Ruin me. Go too far."]

[text: she walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies]

AE HEE LEE, from "Prelude"

[text: Let me tell you how I wished for a long, unfractured life: I slurped noodles, threaded needles. But again and again I dreamt I was a series of footprints pressed deep into the earth, covered in snow.]

Chen Chen, "Elegy for My Sadness", When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

[text: Maybe the centipede in the cellar knows with its many disgusting legs why I am sad. No one else does. I want to be a sweetheart in every moment, full of goats & xylophones, as charming as a hill with a small village on it. I want to be a village full of sweethearts, as you are, every second of the day, cooking me soups & drawing me pictures & holding me, my inexplicable & elephant sadness, with your infinite arms. But isn't it true, you are not always why I am happy. & I promise it is true, you are almost never why, why I am sad. You are just in the same room with me & my unsweet, uncharming, completely uninteresting sadness. I wish it could unbelong itself from me, unstick from my face. Who invented the word "ennui"? A sad Frenchman? A centipede? They should've never been born. They should've seen me in Paris, a sad teenage exchange student. I was so sad & so teenaged, one day my host sister gripped my hand hard & even harder said SOIS HEUREUX. BE HAPPY. & miraculously, I wasn't sad anymore. All I felt was the desire to slap my host sister. See, I was angry in Paris, which is clearly not allowed. One can be sad in Paris (I was) & one can be in love in Paris (I was not), but angry? Angry in Paris? Now, I am in love-- with you!-- though sometimes terribly sad for no good reason, & not so much angry as guilty when you say to me, Don't cry, don't be sad, as if my sadness always need to be your sadness? I wish I could write an elegy from my sadness because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it by kissing you again & again while neither of us can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss I think every single dead person in every part of the world must crave with violent impossibility.]

Franny Choi, from "The Mantis Shrimp Speaks"

[text: This is the only way I know how to tell someone what I want, to describe the infinitely unfolded accordion of my heart. To love with a rage gone blind]

— Franz Kafka, from Letters to Milena (via lumamonchtuna)

[text: I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.]

Abigail Chabitnoy, from "Soon the Weeds Will Be Blooming"

[text: I am tired of feeling this world on fire.]

Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

[text: To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.]

Geographies of Light, Lisa Suhair Majaj

[text: we plant grief drench it with our tears it will not grow]