“The Orchard” (1998) by Justine Kurland, now cover art for the latest edition of The Virgin Suicides
Late July seems like a fantasy land now.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“What was lost in winter / remains lost.”
— Linda Pastan, from A Fraction of Darkness: Poems; “At the Still Point” (via luthienne)
“Whenever I smell a flower—my heart tells me each time that a memory of something extremely beautiful and precious is connected to the fragrance, something that had been mine long ago and became lost. It’s also the same with music, and sometimes with poems—all of a sudden something flashes, just for a moment, as if all at once I saw my lost home below in a valley, and then it immediately disappears and is forgotten.”
— Hermann Hesse, from “Iris”, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (trans. Jack Zipes)
“In the scrubby grass that bordered the concrete, bumblebees were browsing — if I had a garden of my own, I thought, I’d fill it with low forests of clover and all the ugly weeds they adore, I’d throw myself to my knees in service to bees.”
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat
“It’s the darker things I find really beautiful.”
— David Lynch (in ‘Lynch on Lynch’)
The Green Ray (Le Rayon vert)
dir. Éric Rohmer
“Have you ever looked at the sky at night after it has snowed? Orange glow, light caught between somewhere.”
Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water
“In her I had my first experience of the absolute otherness of other people […] Not my father and mother, my teachers, other children…no one had yet been real in the way that [she] was. And if she was real, so, suddenly, was I.”
— John Banville, The Sea
Ivo Petzov - River Nymph (2020)
Sappho, tr. by Anne Carson
Alexis Bledel in Tuck Everlasting (2002)
“Have you ever seen a moon so red it made your blood look white? Have you ever heard a fox scream?”
— Mabel, Episode Six: King in the Labyrinth written by Becca de la Rosa and Mabel Martin (via girlwithouthands)
Dancing Shoes, 1882, Helene Schjerfbeck