We Have / Bartered Away Heaven, / In Starry Nights, In The Apple / Orchards Of Paradise.

A great halo And a tightening in the throat

Dorota Chróścielewska, tr. Regina Grol

I believe in ending sentences with a preposition in order to give the ideas a way out.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

‘Agamemnon,’ Aeschylus (translated by Anne Carson)

The first thing you ever did was cry.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

If I had a prayer, it would say, Let this not be a mirror to the past, nor a window to the future. Let each night be only itself.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

I fear that to write so much about crying will tempt a universal law of irony to invite tragedy into my life.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?

audaces: a study in political phraseology

“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal

catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”

the two voices of virgil’s aeneid 

in defence of catiline

antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc

the duplicate revelation of portia’s death

virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire

the taciturnity of aeneas

gender and the metaphorics of translation

There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of the bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

“You want to know what it was like? It was like my whole life had a fever. Whole acres of me were on fire. The sun talked dirty in my ear all night. I couldn’t drive past a wheatfield without doing it violence. I couldn’t even look at a bridge. I used to go out in the brush sometimes, So far out there no one could hear me, And just burn. I felt all right then. I couldn’t hurt anyone else. I was just a pillar of fire. It wasn’t the burning so much as the loneliness. It wasn’t the loneliness so much as the fear of being alone. Christ look at you pouring from the rocks. You’re so cold you’re boiling over. You’ve got stars in your hair. I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you And never walk back out.”

— Nico Alvarado, “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls” (via cannedheaven)