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[michellehshen]

And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.

— Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

[michellehshen]

However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life unspools itself, I was created to bear it.

— Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias

[michellehshen]

You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

— Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

[michellehshen]

Astonished light is washing over the moor from north to east. I am walking into the light. One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God.

— Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

[michellehshen]

217. "We're only given as much as the heart can endure," "What does not kill you makes you stronger," "Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn": these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadri-paralytic. The tepid "there must be a reason for it" notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has no time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it.

— Maggie Nelson, Bluets

[michellehshen]

Everything changed. Everything changed. Well, what changed? What did the blade reveal? For whom did it come? "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing," wrote Emerson.

— Maggie Nelson, Bluets

[michellehshen]

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

— Maggie Nelson, Bluets

[michellehshen]

92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping — its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)

— Maggie Nelson, Bluets

[michellehshen]

People, thought Geryon, for whom life is a marvelous adventure. He moved off into the tragicomedy of the crowd.

— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

[michellehshen]

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures.

— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

[michellehshen]

You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[michellehshen]

[michellehshen]

You haven’t been honest with yourself. You’re not ready to love someone if you can’t even admit your feelings and needs to yourself.

Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

[michellehshen]

In confronting my desires, I felt sorrow and regret over my former, unrealistic ways of thinking, but I was also moved and inspired. After having come so close to ending my life, I came back, my will to live completely reawakened. I faced reality, where I would learn to live again, this time boldly and fearlessly. My body was screaming at me, telling me that life was a gift. The agony of the past few years, like the conflict between the real me and the one everyone knew, is gone. I even feel a little sorry for my old self, so feeble and self-pitying. It seems I’ve finally come around to living the life I’ve always dreamed of.

— Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

[michellehshen]

God I wished I was dead. This woman had to be part of some hellish eternal recurrence.

— Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

[michellehshen]

I’d always been surrounded by people who cared for me, but no matter how much they loved me, they couldn’t save me: It just wasn’t me. I never let others get too close and simply paraded a fake me that resembled their image of me.

— Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

[michellehshen]

“It’s the nation that does not permit you to live.”

Death by Hanging (1968), dir. Nagisa Ōshima