Nostalgia

– Callista Buchen

Every time you can’t find the right words just remember that most of the time there is no need to verbalize at all. There’s nothing more poetic than your own inner silence. There’s nothing more outstandingly beautiful or terrifying than the thoughts which are “stubborn” enough to find no expression at the time. Accept restlessness. Accept temporary incapacity of eloquence or mindful, concrete realization. Cherish complexity, confusion and silence. Cherish the current flow of your own being. What doesn’t immediately come out, stays inside; but that shall not scare you. Look deeply into it all. And have patience. 

30 trips around the sun and im still surprised when the days get shorter after a long summer like the nights already feel much cooler now and soon it'll be dark at 4 in the afternoon and i'll go wow man look how dark it is and it's only 4 and come spring ill realize that wow you can actually tell the days are getting longer and warmer isnt that crazy and in the summer i'll be lying in bed at 11 thinking woah it's still not dark out and then in september ill say to myself phew that sure was a long summer you can already tell the days are getting shorter and ill remember this post and maybe ill go look for it and reblog it and dear reader, i for one hope that we both live to see it

— Jonathan Safran Foer, from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005)  (via memoryslandscape)

when you practice kindness and i mean seriously, consciously choose it over and over again, it shows. that kind of selfless love etches itself into your laugh lines, steeps like a teabag until your words are inherently graceful. sometimes we spit out that choice through gritted teeth, but late at night when time stands still, the universe kisses your eyelids and promises you twice the love in return.

i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you're also grieving for yourself a little bit

They say you never really know how much room someone takes up until they’re gone. but I wish I could tattoo the way you whisper my name over and over again, like it’s something you’re convincing the universe to never take away from you. If the ocean had a heartbeat, it’d be you. I love like my heart is hungry for light, and you’re the last star in the sky. darling, I’m not saying that I think we might belong together, but I do know that I’ve lost my heart to your smile in every single one of my lifetimes.

I just want to fall in love, and stay there.

Love

when sleeping at last said "I want to love you but I don't know how" and when bojack horseman said "I do love you, by the way. I mean as much as I'm capable of loving anyone. which is never enough" and when william faulkner said "perhaps they were right putting love into books. perhaps it could not live anywhere else" and when lorde said "my mother's love is choking me" and when siken said "if you love me, henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand" and when maggie stiefvater said "need was adam’s baseline, his resting pulse. love was a privilege" and when benjamin alire sáenz said "but love was always something heavy for me. something I had to carry"

— James Baldwin, from If Beale Street Could Talk

It’s weird to grow up in a family where you know you’re loved but you don’t feel loved. And then later in adulthood you understand how almost impossible it seems to cross that distance and let yourself experience closeness, how otherworldly love feels now and how love feels unbearable at times. You flinch when someone tries to wholeheartedly love you. And over and over you see so clearly how you cannot be loved unless it's from afar and love is mixed with that familiar sensation of distance and coldness.

“we’ll figure it out together” is my love language

— Taylor Jenkins Reid, Maybe in Another Life

— Martha Gellhorn, 1931 (via durbeyfields)

— Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galatea Kazantzaki wr. c. May 1923

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” ― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.” ― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“November 11

Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà, I’m home now.” ― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

“My life is over, for during the transport he has drowned in the river, he was my life, I loved him more than my life.” ― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

— Mariève Rugo, from “On Not Being Able to Write,” What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry, ed. by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill (Gibbs Smith, 1995)