— Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, from The Freezer Door (via lifeinpoetry)
"Greetings to the Universe in 55 Different Languages", a poem compiled out of messages from the Voyager spacecraft
a year.
january calls me a coward, L.H. / february, N.T. / to march, emily dickinson / an ode to april, @written-honey / daydreaming of may, @still-untitled / the truth the dead know, anne saxton / everything changed when i forgave myself, charlotte eriksson / will you be quiet, please? raymond carver / turquoise silence, sanober khan / untitled, @nightb-us / tristesse, gottfried benn (trans. david paisey) / the month of december, @voddxa
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown | 12x01 | Kenya
“Gay sex life, unlike straight sex life, is never a private matter. When a man and a woman walk hand in hand, it is their love that they make public. When two men walk hand in hand, it is their sex life that they make public… Our words are acts; our privacy is public. This reality stems from the nature of homophobia.”
—
Rabbi Steven Greenberg
“Wrestling with G-d and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition” (2004)
J.D. McClatchy, “THE DIALOGUE OF DESIRE AND GUILT”
quotes on being with the love of your life, your soulmate and finally being at peace
• Frank O’Hara, “Steps”
• “It’s pouring, the trees are getting greener before my eyes, I love you. I’m almost afraid of the intensity of this happiness.”
“You and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love.”
“The thought that you exist is so divinely blissful in itself that it is ridiculous to talk about the everyday sadness of separation—a week’s, ten days’—what does it matter? since my whole life belongs to you.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, from letters to his wife Vera
• Raymond Carver, “The Gift” / “Best Time of Day”
• “I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”
— Franz Kafka, from The Castle
• Yanyi, “Aubade”
• “You and I have almost achieved that which is never achieved: we sit in each other’s souls.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millais
• Richard Siken, from “Snow and Dirty Rain”
• “I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now.”
— Tennessee Williams, from a personal letter
• June Jordan, Poems for Haruko / “West Coast Episode”
• ““I’m going,” he tells Jude, but then he doesn’t move. A dragonfly, as shiny as a scarab, hums above them. “I’m going,” he repeats, but he still doesn’t move, and it is only the third time he says it that he’s finally able to stand up from the lounge chair, drunk on the hot air, and shove his feet back into his loafers.
“Limes,” says Jude, looking up at him and shielding his eyes against the sun.
“Right,” he says, and bends down, takes Jude’s sunglasses off him, kisses him on his eyelids, and replaces his glasses.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, from A Little Life
• W.S. Merwin, “In Time” / “Wish”
• “I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, “Will you bring me a glass of water?” I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, “Do you remember when you were a little girl and you would ask your mama to bring you a glass of water?” Yeah. “You know how half the time you weren’t even thirsty. You just wanted that hand that was attached to that glass that was attached to that person you just wanted to stay there until you fell asleep.” She took the glass of water that I brought her and just sat it down full on the table next to her. Wow, I thought. What am I gonna do with love like this.”
— Dito Montiel, One Night
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (via soracities)
- my english professor
I think about this quote all the time and I feel like it explains a lot of things about human behavior
An hour and four minutes in. Fourth time crying.
does the mortifying ordeal of being known guy know that his paragraph from a six year old NYT opinion piece about emailing pictures of goats to coworkers has become God Tier Tumblr Gospel ? like does he KNOW though
But what I wish I could tell all those children of the internet, holed up in their rooms, isolated online, is that they can only imagine the worst of relationships: they think that what another person will learn about them is what they see in themselves — the squirming, icky, insecure mess inside. They don’t know yet that the ways in which they’re secretly screwed up and repulsive are boringly ordinary. The issue isn’t that you’ll be despised for who you really are — that, as a friend and I used to say about girls we were dating, “she’ll realize.” It’s scarier than that: it’s that you lose control over who you are. Other people get to decide. And it may turn out that you’re not who you thought you were.
As an artist, you don’t get to decide why people love your work. […] I would describe my reaction to seeing my writing reanimated as meme as “nonplussed,” maybe “bemused.” It always does some slight violence to a writer’s intentions to yank a sentence out of its context and present it as if it were a complete, isolated thought, like a maxim or commandment. I am not in the business of pretending to be in possession of any wisdom, or of telling other people what to do: this is the realm of self-help and advice writers — in other words, of charlatans. Part of me worries it’s an indictment of my prose that it should lend itself so well to Tumblr memes, the digital equivalent of needlepoint samplers. […]
But the things people love about you aren’t necessarily the things you want to be loved for. They decide they like you for reasons completely outside your control, of which you’re often not even conscious: it’s certainly not because of the big act you put on, all the charm and anecdotes you’ve calculated for effect. (And if your act does fool someone, it only makes you feel like a successful fraud, and harbor some secret contempt for them — the contempt of a con artist for his mark — plus now you’re condemned to keep up that act forever, lest she Realize.) My last girlfriend found my flaws, the things that annoy even me about me, amusing. When you break up with someone, you don’t just lose them, but a version of yourself. You don’t even get to know what your children will remember you for; it probably won’t be what you thought were the important moments. […]
As The Velveteen Rabbit teaches, we don’t become fully real except in other people’s eyes, and in their affections. At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.
okay...... go off poet
excuse me if this makes very little sense as i have been drinking and it is almost eleven pm on a wednesday but today i walked into my favourite cafe and the frenchman who makes my coffee, didier, told me about how he had just discovered that the woman who had left as I came in happened to live on the same street as his brother, “isn’t the world remarkable?” he said to me. I laughed, “don’t you wonder about how many people you meet on a daily basis that you have something in common with without realising?”
Tonight I had beers with a couple of guys, they were old friends. “How long have you known each other?” I asked. They laughed, “guess!” Turns our they shared a wetnurse, a connection their mothers didn’t discover until they became friends years later.
As I walked to the train I texted my housemate to ask where she was, if she wanted to meet up before we headed home. Suddenly I heard my name called as she ran across the station towards me. “Oh how strange, I just messaged you!”
Sometimes the world feels very large and our differences seem unbridgeable. Other days we run into one another over and over again, and I am glad to recognise friends.
“I feel so compelled to give a detailed answer to everything. People tell me over and over, ‘Jenny, you don’t have to say everything.’ But I forget. I straight-up forget, and I’m not sure how to change without completely silencing myself.” Jenny Slate for Marie Claire
- The gospel according to fleabag, Tara Isabella Burton (X)
… men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, trans. Anne Carson
