"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. all these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

Fernando Pessoa (via fernandopessoa-is-not-for-you)

"When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy - if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. So MEDITATION can take place when you are sitting in a bus or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds or looking at the face of your wife or child."

Jiddu Krishnamurti (via heartmindspirit)

(Source: heartmindawakening)

Poetry

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible!: Defenseless love is suicide. Under that open sky nothing falling...

ubelmensch:

Defenseless love is suicide. Under that open sky nothing falling survives the rigors of identification. Where once men and women sought communion in sexual love, innocent of the need for programmatic valuation, they now deploy themselves across a level of existence composed of silences and daunted withdrawals. The theme of modern love is isolation. No longer is the lover prepared to experience sentimental pain, that traditional embellishment that gives desire a degree of symmetry. We did not fall into the trap of matter in order to be redeemed by love and thrust upward into the world of pure form. Clearly we did not, she thought. No longer can lovers regard sex as the mysterious chrism of their life together, as nature partaken, the rayed balsamic flowers worn by a woodland god. Sex is painted on the very walls, spread on white bread. Lovers, then, once their secret language has been despoiled by synthetic exchange, are forced to disengage their love from biology and keep it in seclusion. What replaces erotic language? Oral sex, she answered brightly. Tongues wagging in appointed crannies. Lap, pal, left to right. Unsuspecting mouth devoured by the genitals to which it presumes to communicate its moist favors. Defenses must be built to save the lovers from what unfolds around them and then again within their love itself to shelter each from the other’s patent treachery. What is defenseless love but an invitation to nipple-pricking pain? Knowing the rules, we all shout at the jumper to jump. On the other hand, she thought, love does not speak to theorists. 

-Don DeLillo. Ratner’s Star. 

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."

Hermann Hesse (via libraryland)

Ghostology by Rebecca Lindenberg

The whistler’s
inhale,

the white space
between is

and not
or after a question,

a pause. Nothing
isn’t song:
a leaf hatching
from its green shell,

frost whorling
across a windshield,

an open door
opening

apoetreflects:

“This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.”  That won’t do.  A poor show.  Life is a mystery, love is a delight.  Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e. God.  In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.”

—Walker Percy, from Questions They Never Asked Me (Lord John Press, 1979)

"If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average. Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what’s coming next. A lot of poets historically have described a kind of trance. It’s not like a Vedic trance where your eyes cross, and you float. It’s a process not of knowing, but of unknowing, of learning again. The next word or phrase that’s written has to feel as if it’s being written for the first time, that you are discovering the meaning of the word as you put it down."

Derek Walcott, as cited in Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur (via litverve)

"I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded."

― Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (via sincerely-yoursnikkit)

litverve:

Paul Cézanne, Le Lac Dannecy, 1896, via Gallerix (with thanks to peira)

"I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’?"

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 27 February 1926 (via proustitute)

Ridiculous Times

“Put it this way. These are ridiculous times, and if it all makes sense to you, there’s probably something wrong.” - Dr. Barbara L. Milrod, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College

(Source: The New York Times)

poetsorg:

oh god it’s wonderful

to get out of bed

and drink too much coffee

and smoke too many cigarettes

and love you so much

-Frank O’Hara

missfolly:

Woman Holding a Bouquet of Flowers, ca. 1884, by William Merritt Chase 

(Source: whitepaperquotes)