“I am young, and, at last, life is not so dark and so painful. The sun shines, and the moon is calm.”
— Takuboku Ishikawa, from “Romaji Diary & Sad Toys,” published c. 1985
are there any poems you have on home, if its ok to ask? i feel homesick for a home beyond my reach and thought i could come to you.
“I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home
“it’s as if I had to go back home on foot, alone, barefoot not knowing where far away, everybody else went long ago”
— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic)
“[ON LOSING LOVE]: This is the model I propose. You are arriving home and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart shaped.”
— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters
— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“‘I’m homesick all the time,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I just don’t know where home is. There’s this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it’s like chasing the moon - just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again.”
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon
“Wickedness has leaked into the home I made, / and I want to burn it down. Sister, tell me / how you stand the murderous fury. You there / still singing, I crave demolishing, to eat / explosives.”
— Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “Home Fires”
“At the core of all sighs is a name, a stone from the body’s last lost home.”
— Karen Solie, from “Days Inn,” Short Haul Engine
“To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad?”
— Chen Chen, from “Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet”
“Feeling what we all feel: home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.”
— Richard Blanco, from “Mexican Almuerzo in New England”
— Ross Gay, from Bringing the Shovel Down; “Because”
“I want to ask was there ever one / moment when all of it relented, / when rain and ocean and their own / sense of home were revealed to them / as one and the same?”
— Eavan Boland, from In a Time of Violence
“I: Why not take the shorter way home. HT: There is no shorter way home.”
— Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours; “Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)”
sorry I wasn’t in the mood to be a person today, sorry I forgot to keep a conversation, sorry my soul needs ironing. give me a moment, a day or a so. it’ll be good. I’ll brush my hair and change my clothes. I’ll laugh a lot. I’ll say important things. it’ll be good.
summer’s almost over so here’s some summer themed drawings~
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Confessional // Sue Zhao
“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.”
— Deepak Chopra (via lazyyogi)
When Adam bit the apple he did it because he trusted Eve. Because he loved her. Adam bit into the apple because the woman he loved told him to, no matter what God said. No matter the rules of heaven. What’s heaven to a woman’s love anyway? What’s God to your wife? The first sins of humanity, were trusting others. Eve trusted a snake, Adam trusted Eve, and I trust you. Maybe that’s a sin, just like the first couple. Maybe everyone’s right about us and we’re sinners and we offend God. But like I said, what’s God to a woman’s love anyway? What has heaven got that I can’t find sitting next to you on a cool autumn morning?
when kafka said ‘you wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it’ and when brontë said ‘if you ever looked at me with what I know is in you, I would be your slave’ and when Sartre said ‘if I’ve got to suffer it may as well be at your hands’
oliver baez bendorf “bone dust” // “you up?” rachelle toarmino // “vocabulary” bao phi // svetlana alexievich “secondhand time”(trans. bela shayevich) // har alluri “ancestral memory” // céline sciamma on portrait of a lady on fire // “the glass essay” anne carson
Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947 - 1963