Russian Literature

Takuboku Ishikawa, from a diary entry featured in Romaji Diary and Sad Toys

Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don't find yourself.

— Franz Kafka, Diaries 1914-1923

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from "Short Story" in The Collected Poems

there's something about Dostoyevsky characters suddenly bursting into tears that just hits different

James Baldwin.

“We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in Nearer the Moon: The Previously Unpublished Unexpurgated Diary, 1937-1939

“They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.”

— Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds