It's A Pale, Silent Day: I Would Like To Be Walking In A Wood, Far Away.

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written in 1912, featured in Letters To Felice

She’s a ten but she threw 100,000 rubles in the fire and dared her fiancé to pull them out, abandoned another fiancé at the altar, and wreaks chaos wherever she goes, so she’s a twelve.

Anne Sexton, from a letter featured in Anne Sexton; A Self-Portrait In Letters

Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Dorothy Brett, dated 14 August 1918

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Dickens told me,” Dostoyevsky recalled in a letter written years later, “that all the good, simple people in his novels … are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love… . There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel, I try to live my life.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his family and friends

hey sorry your boyfriend said that russian classics are about that life is bleak. yeah he meant dostoyevsky and tolstoy. no, he didn't look beyond any of the lowest lows of the stories. he didn't even see the overarching themes of beauty and hope and connection. frankly we have all been laughing about him and we're gonna beat him up now. sorry

Franz Kafka

Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures

“I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet