mcflurriesanddurries

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“Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen of lust, / bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. / Sometimes, the men – they come with keys, / and sometimes, the men – they come with hammers.”

— Warsan Shire, from “The House,” Her Blue Body

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Apollo e Dafne (Detail), 2020 - Roberto Ferri

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Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

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Pierre Jahan Nu Plain-chant 1947

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to be soft and kind in the face of injustice and as the aftermath of pain, to choose good despite of every bad thing that you’ve had to endure, that’s real strength. don’t resort to believing that strength requires inhumanity.

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“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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“I didn’t leave because I stopped loving you, I left because the longer I stayed the less I loved myself.”

— Rupi Kaur

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“In the end, you know that only yourself could heal you. You have to take time to figure it out. The choice is in your hands. My dear old friend, you love and you learn.”

— Chuck Akot

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Rainbow Rayleigh Moon. Rayleigh scattering is responsible for this phenomenon.

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“I will be girl with claws, heart bared and bruised and wanting. I am soul-shattering wolf-howl. I am lioness and hunt. I am more and enough. I am.”

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Venetta Octavia, “Maybe the Apples Grew, but It Was so Long Ago I Only Remember Seed”

(taken from @venettaoctavia‘s debut poetry collection Prelude to Light, which is now available for pre-order)

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Deborah Levy

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“You are a lovely apparition, a nature's lovely form, a butterfly in metamorphosis.”

— Chuck Akot, from Waterline and Other Poems, Aspetto bello