resonant words

[loyalless]

"What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is quietly killing me. Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late."
— Jeanette Winterson, 'The Green Man'


"I was like someone dying of thirst who hasn’t the strength left to drink. That’s how thirsty I was for love."
— Hélène Cixous, Angst


"Carry acceptance in you
the aftersound of something felled."
— Jorie Graham, ‘Daphne’


"I have known fear before I have known love.
I have known waste like the flesh at the bottom
of the river. I have forgotten what it is like to survive."
— EJ Koh, 'The Joyful God'


"So each night I tear off the old day from the calendar, and screw it tight into a ball. I do this vindictively. I do not pray. I revenge myself upon the day. I wreak my spite upon its image. You are dead now, I say, hated day."
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves


"repeat it to yourself
like a wish
i am nothing
i am nothing
i am nothing
so often
the only reason you know
you’re still alive is from the
heaving of your chest"
— Rupi Kaur, 'the art of being empty'


"There is a flat logic to neglect."
— Kaveh Akbar, ‘God’


"Long ago, I was wounded.
I learned
to exist, in reaction,
out of touch
with the world: I’ll tell you
what I meant to be–
a device that listened."
— Louise Glück, ‘Parados’


"You were sick, so sick, with your wound of thwarted longing; you wanted the power to change the illusions you live in."
— Alice Notley, 'Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me'


"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living."
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close


"I want you to know, what you feel
is more than empty space."
— Elizabeth Morton, 'Aubade with Hold Music'


"It is never too late to turn significant."
— Mina Pam Dick, ‘Clara sequence (Cs)—a Lyrical Element’


"Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides."
— Ada Limón, 'Dead Stars'