T: Words - Tumblr Posts
I don’t know if you ever let someone down, got your ass kicked, or straight up failed. Those are the moments that define us, they push you further than you ever thought possible and force you to make choices… no matter what the cost.
Cole McGrath, inFAMOUS (via embvrs)
You may think me aloof but I have loved you a thousand times on paper.
Honey Jumalon (via 90skidvagabond)
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942) / Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out (2005)
“Do you know what a poem is, Esther?”
“No, what?” I would say.
“A piece of dust.”
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, “So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.”
And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.
— Sylvia Plath, from The Bell Jar
Could you please write something about forgiving oneself even if it's hard? About forgiving yourself even though you know for a fact that you don't deserve it?
i stood at the canyon’s edge, all my mistakes / clenched in my trembling hands. i did not / throw them down into the scarlet, heat-blistered / dust. i lifted them to my mouth / & swallowed them whole. i turned / away to the horizon, as violet & sharp / as a fresh wound, & i pushed myself forward, / knowing soon, from out of this / darkness, stars will rise, blue-winged, to guide me.
i was tasked with creating a shakespeare scene/monologue using only lines from other plays + ended up getting a perfect 100 for this lmao
@jeynegrey told me to post this so i had to comply
(annotations under the cut)
Keep reading
Mary Oliver, "I don’t want to live a small life" from Red Bird
Mary Oliver, "On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate" from Devotions
George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley, from Collected Poems; “The House Near The Sea,”
a compilation on memory, part two (part one here)
—can’t stop returning to this scene of leaving, / can’t stop pausing this scene, thinking I’ve left something out again,
Chen Chen, from When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities; “Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls”
Mary Ruefle, “Deconstruction”
(…) no one wants a half-remembered tragedy. You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.
Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party, ‘Addendum II to No Baptism’
—so here we are again, one handedly fingering / the puckered edges of the exit wounds / memory leaves behind,
Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Givingly”
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together / to make a creature that will do what I say / or love me back.
Richard Siken, from Crush
Naomi Shihab Nye, from “The Tent”
But perhaps it is a way of understanding the unthinkable. If a story haunts us, we keep telling it to ourselves, replaying it in silence while we shower, while we walk down streets, or in our moments of insomnia.
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water: A Memoir
…memory is an act of imagination, you never tell the same story twice, not even to yourself.
Michael Burkard, as featured in Mary Ruefle’s On Imagination
Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)
I told my version – faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage; “Sliver”
I think this means / there was no night. / The night was in my head.
Louise Glück, from Averno; “Landscape”
Joan Didion, from “Goodbye to All That” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem The National, “Ada” in Boxer (2007)
