“I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center.”

— Margaret Atwood, from “Variation on the Word Sleep” (via commovente)

(via commovente)

12:00 pm  •  21 May 2013  •  1,275 notes

ronakeller:

- Daniell Koepke

4:00 pm  •  20 May 2013  •  32 notes

“And there’s Jamie, standing on the cliff-edge, screwing up a piece of blue paper and throwing it into the sea.”

— Scarlett Thomas, from Bright Young Things (via the-final-sentence)

8:00 pm  •  19 May 2013  •  84 notes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

— Franz Kafka (via paradoxicalsentiments)

(Source: accidentalism, via paradoxicalsentiments)

11:27 pm  •  15 May 2013  •  260 notes

“I loved you at your darkest.”

— Romans 5:8 (via xplsns)

(Source: teopoli.com, via writingsforwinter)

8:00 pm  •  12 May 2013  •  67,261 notes

“Sometimes bridges burning isn’t a bad thing. It prevents you from going back to a place you should never have been to begin with.”

— Unknown (via dulcetdecember)

(Source: dontrunbeforeyoulearntowalk, via shadowsandfog)

7:54 pm  •  6 May 2013  •  5,953 notes

“What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.
You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.
Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”
Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.”

— Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters (via anais-927)

(via imustrememberthis)

11:28 am  •  5 May 2013  •  10,229 notes

“I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what’s called loving, as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.”

— Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (via larmoyante)

11:28 am  •  5 May 2013  •  653 notes

“You’re still going to get criticized, so you might as well do whatever the fuck you want.”

— Kathleen Hanna (via franki-e)

(Source: a-great-strange-dream, via awriterandnothingelse)

4:00 am  •  5 May 2013  •  88,426 notes

writingsforwinter:

Someday I hope you’ll remove all the butterflies from your stomach

and count them up one by one, then place them in a manila envelope

to keep for all the times you need to feel something;

then you can let them free again. I wish you knew that loneliness

is a hell of a lot like soft-serve ice cream: it can be soothing

when you get it in small doses, but when you take too large

of a serving, you’ll end up making yourself sick.

Sometimes your body feels like a sunrise that hasn’t started

making its way out of the sky yet, but I promise you

that every ray of sun has to start somewhere,

even buried in the ground with the dirt and the insects,

so deep someone has to dig it out.

But someday someone is going to buy 20,000 shovels

and every single one is gonna be for you,

and they’ll bring every ray of sun, every cloud, to the surface again.

Honey, God himself probably bragged to the angels

when he created you, and even Satan

would want you to remain on Earth

so he could watch you from above and admire your beauty.

I know your heart feels so heavy sometimes that it’s

weighing down your throat like all those stones

in Virginia Woolf’s pockets, but that’s just the heaviness

of a heart that knows how to love

pretty damn much better than anybody else.

If there were a crash course in learning how to not hate yourself

at school, I’d want you to have the best teacher

in the entire world. Every time you take another pill

is another second you could have for getting better.

Every step you take to the top of the rooftop

is another step you could have taken

to get yourself back down.

And I know this self-hatred is luggage over the carrying capacity

at the airport, but someday you’ll learn how to remove

all the items you don’t need from its suitcases,

and stop breaking your back with its load.

There’s a reason God made humans with hands.

It’s so that every time they fall,

they can drag themselves back up again.

11:17 am  •  3 May 2013  •  1,390 notes