knifeupmysleeve

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Clarice Lispector, from her novel titled "The Passion According to G. H.," originally published in 1964

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from kim addonizio's now we're getting somewhere

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Vahan Teryan - "Coming to Terms" (Selected Poems) tr. by Diana Der Hovanessian

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“Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.”

— Iris Murdoch | The Sea, The Sea

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Alice Notley, from In The Pines: Poems; "The Black Trailor (A Noir Fiction),"

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“One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.”

— Ingmar Bergman; Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Bjorkman

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Anne Carson, from Glass, Irony and God; “The Glass Essay”

Text ID: The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April / carve into me with knives of light.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay // "Spring" [ID in alt text]

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Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Letter written to his sister Ludmila, 1905

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Ilya Kaminsky, from “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck”, Deaf Republic

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“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

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Duplicity by Jameson Fitzpatrick

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Franny Choi, from "I Guess By Now I Thought I’d Be Done With Shame"

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“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.”

— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (via bluebeardsbride)

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But my rage was there, it was there, it pretended to sleep but it never slept, the merest touch of a feather was enough to bring it howling, roaring out.

– James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

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Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, from ‘A great Hope fell’

TEXT ID: A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my Life had entered it