But if not, I want to remind you ]and beautiful times we had.
For many crowns of violets and roses ]at my side you put on
and many woven garlands made of flowers around your soft throat.
— Sappho, from “Sappho’s Confession,“ tr. Anne Carson
“i want to run so fast that all my friends are safe / & it won’t matter if we don’t make rent.”
— June Gehringer, from kiss me so good i believe again
a sputtering a stuttering a slant a song a rising a falling a driving to the edge & waiting a waiting for the edge to fall an edging closer to the fall a wanting the fall to crush and now i am in the fall i am the fall
— Leah Umansky, from “Desire [even in the time of the tyrant],” published in Poem-a-Day
Fate/stay night (2006)
Let's go home.
Wouldn’t we tear seas, cities, money to get to each other?
— Sarah Gambito, from “Grace,” published in Poetry
“Finally, in a low whisper, he said, ‘I think I might be a terrible person.’ For a split second I believed him - I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”
— Miranda July, The First Bad Man (via wordsnquotes)
“Where do voices go when voices go? The country you want / does not want you.”
— Emily Vizzo, from “In Eulogies,” published in Narrative
“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.”
— Nan Goldin (via quotemadness)
Marcel Proust, from The Complete Short Stories; “Pleasures and Regrets,”
“But no–she did not break down. She persisted.”
— D. H. Lawrence, from “The Lost Girl,” originally published c. 1920 (via violentwavesofemotion)
“People act according to the way they experience the world. If you can understand their experience, you can understand their behavior.”
— R.D. Laing (via quotemadness)
Our girl’s a rebel
I say it hurts to exist like this and the world says stop existing like that.
— Jill Mceldowney, from “The Swimming Pool,” published in Moonchild Magazine
How can I see anything
but this: how trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters
of forgetting.
— Natasha Trethewey, from “Waterborne,” Monument: Poems New and Selected
