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“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.”

— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

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“Languages are not algorithms of one another, you cannot match them item for item,” she says, adding “what if [there is] a word that does not intend to be translatable.” She calls this “a word that stops itself,” and writes: “in the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free.” There it is again, that indescribable nearness, the sense of proximity to something words can’t identify.

— In which she is Anne Carson, as written here.

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Yrsa Daley-Ward, all the wrong colours

[Text ID: “What else can my hands / do with the blood? Pray?”]

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“You’re made for great things, including love, but not limited to love. Everything is yours.”

— Caitlyn Siehl (via tristamateer)

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“I remember you in honey, in old combs, in the faded colours of clothes hanging in the garden.”

— Pratyusha, excerpt of ‘Starflowers’. Published in The Literateur (via herhoneydress)

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tender truisms

it is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender (jenny holzer)

incorporate tenderness into everyday language (gashii)

attention is the beginning of devotion (mary oliver)

consciously study how to be tender to each other until it becomes a habit (audre lorde)

tenderness is in the hands (carolyn forché)

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“I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow.”

— Hélène Cixous, from “The Love of the Wolf”

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E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962

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Mary Oliver, from Devotions: “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses”

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“This body, remembering yours, is the keepsake you left.”

— Izumi Shikibu, excerpt of “Why Haven’t I—”, trans. by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani in The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono No Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (via antigonick)

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—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of The Island/ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women/ Unknown/ John Keats, To The Ladies Who Saw Me Crowned/ Anne Sexton, Suicide Note: The Complete Poems/ Irish Murdoch, The Italian Girls/ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath/ Anne Sexton, The Truth the Dead Know/ Virginia Woolf, The Waves/ Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Sonnets

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“I’m at home, betrothed to blue, with her refracted light. The light is home, this blue is blue all through my word.”

— Agha Shahid Ali, ‘My Word’ in Call Me Ishmael Tonight

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“Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be…and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”

— Andrea Gibson

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“reasons to not kiss him: 1. you weren’t raised to love tender. 2. when he’s around all you do is tremble. when he’s around you want to get on your knees. look how much power he has over you. it’s dangerous. 3. he’s too good at forgiving and you’re too good at violence. 4. you know what they say about monsters. you know what happens to the boys who love them. are you going to do that to him? 5. your hands don’t know how to be gentle. think about the last beautiful thing that shattered in your palms. the fresh rosebuds crumbling between your fingers like a bruise. you wolf-boy, you war machine. you wouldn’t know how to hold something magic and not destroy it. 6. if you hurt him it might kill you 7. if you hurt him you might kill yourself. 8. you are very bad at rehabilitation. this is one addiction you’d fail to give up. he’s going to ruin you for all other kisses and all other boys and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to forget his name. 9. you still aren’t sure he isn’t a dream. 10. if you kiss him, you might wake up.reasons to kiss him: 1. because he’s beautiful. 2. because he asked. 3. because he preceded please with, i’m not afraid of you.”

— yes & no // natalie wee (via wondersmithinc)

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ed. by Jane Portal, from Chinese Love Poetry; “from The Book of Songs”

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— Richard Siken, from Littany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

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― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous