Category: Uncategorized

• t-z

  The arterial angel.

  Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas

  I will not be another flower, picked for my beauty and left to die. I will be wild, difficult to find, and impossible to forget.

  Erin Van Vuren

  

  “THE BODY was found
  haloed by flies—& I looked beautiful

  in their thousands of eyes.
  Didn’t I?”

  — Michael Wasson, A Soliloquy Would Imply That the Stage Is Empty

  

  “I feel like I am floating in plasma I need a teacher or a lover I need someone to risk being involved with me. I am so vain and I am so masochistic. How can they coexist?”

  — Francesca Woodman

  Again, my mind vibrates uncomfortably as it always does. Actually, I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words. I do not let myself think. This is a fact. I cannot face much of the meaning. Shut my mind to anything but work and bowls. And I wonder as I let the month run through my fingers: Can I get out of it? Out of it all? Truth is, I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin. (Isn’t it all dust and ashes?) I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell…and my heart currently resembles the ashes of my cigarettes; in fact, I’m in the mood to dissolve into the sky.

  Virginia Woolf, in a diary entry dated 1 July 1918, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol.I: 1915-1919

  “Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”

  — Virginia Woolf

  “I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? – like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?”

  — Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 18 August 1929

  December 20th

  This is almost the shortest day and perhaps the coldest night of the year. We are in the black heart of a terrific frost. 

  December 20, 1927
  — Virginia Woolf, “A Writer’s Diary” (1918 – 1941)

  “We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things, The actual green of summer, and summer’s half-truth. We tend to repeat ourselves.”

  — Charles Wright, from “Polaroids,” A Short History of the Shadow: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

  January 31, 2025

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• q-s

  

  

  

  “At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.”

  — Anne Sexton, from Those Times… in “The Complete Poems Of Anne Sexton”

  “…he said loudly “I am not dying” and I said “for me you are.””

  — Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters

  “what is your death but an old belonging,”

  — Anne Sexton, from Sylvia’s Death in “The Complete Poems Of Anne Sexton”

  “You danced with me never saying a word. Instead the serpent spoke as you held me close. The serpent, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me like a great god and we bent together like two lonely swans.”

  —- Anne Sexton, The Death of The Fathers

  So much of what we learn about love is taught to us by people who never really loved us.

  — r.h Sin 

  “My most distant love – when I dream of you I wake in a field so blue I drown.”

  — Danez Smith, from Don’t Call Us Dead—

  When he’s not looking at me, I search for my reflection on the wall. All I see is a nail on which a painting hung.

  Wisława Szymborska, tr. by Joanna Trzeciak, from Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska; “Drinking Wine”

  January 31, 2025

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