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Eldest daughters be like: at this point I don’t know exactly who am I protecting and from what. I just feel a crushing sense of responsibility

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Jenny Holzer

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Walter Crane (1845-1915)

Art Nouveau Socialist IIustrations

web

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In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

Prints!

Took some time for a personal piece in the middle of doing commissions.

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i may not know a lot abt life but i know it’s how keith haring said “touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion” and how kurt vonnegut said “and I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exlaim or murmur or think at some point, if this isn’t nice, I don’t what is,” and olga jacoby said “to leave a good example to those I love [is] my only understanding of immortality” and felix poswolsky said “I think we found the answer to the universe which was, quite simply: spend more time with your friends”

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no one tells you how much of life takes practice. not just writing, painting, running, singing, etc, but practicing how to make friends. how to make the right ones. getting practiced at how to be a good friend, a good sibling, a good person. practice identifying when people haven’t earned that. learning to recognize your right to rage and, eventually, how to offer mercy. so much of life is muscle memory, and i’ve begun to realize there are so many more parts of ourselves to flex and stretch and strengthen than those we’re taught in anatomy lessons

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“Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly; In my own way, and with my full consent. Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely Went to their deaths more proud than this one went. Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping I will confess; but that’s permitted me; Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free. If I had loved you less or played you slyly I might have held you for a summer more, But at the cost of words I value highly, And no such summer as the one before. Should I outlive this anguish—and men do— I shall have only good to say of you.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XLVII (via bergmans-ghost)

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When Adam bit the apple he did it because he trusted Eve. Because he loved her. Adam bit into the apple because the woman he loved told him to, no matter what God said. No matter the rules of heaven. What’s heaven to a woman’s love anyway? What’s God to your wife? The first sins of humanity, were trusting others. Eve trusted a snake, Adam trusted Eve, and I trust you. Maybe that’s a sin, just like the first couple. Maybe everyone’s right about us and we’re sinners and we offend God. But like I said, what’s God to a woman’s love anyway? What has heaven got that I can’t find sitting next to you on a cool autumn morning?

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Maggie Smith, from “Rain, New Year’s Eve”

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“You don’t meet the people you love, you recognize them.”

― Anna Gavalda, “Life, Only Better” , trans. Tina Kover

“You and I know each other in our bones”

― Kurt Vonnegut, from a letter to Nanny Vonnegut 

“but everyone had this patina

  of slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of

  I think I knew you when we were children,

  this look of I’ve loved you ever since you

were born

  and probably longer than that”

― Paul Hostovsky, from “Everyone was Beautiful,” Dear Truth (Main Street Rag, 2009)

“He’s been here in my heart before I even knew him. Understand? He’s always been here. Always.”

― Sandra Cisneros , from Woman at Hollering Creek: Stories; “Never Marry a Mexican,”

“You came into my life–not as one comes to visit…but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps…”

— Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to Véra Slonim (1923), Letters to Véra

“I love you. I feel as though we were never strangers, you and I, not even for a moment.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Mathilde Trampedach

“Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”

— Robert Brault

“Here when I say “I never want to be without you,”

somewhere else I am saying

“I never want to be without you again.” And when I touch you

in each of the places we meet in all of the lives we are,

it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected.

When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,

in each place and forever.

— Bob Hicok, Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

“She said that she had been searching for my eyes in the crowd because she felt as if she were talking to my heart.”

— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name,” published c. 1982

“Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening…”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from You who never arrived (tr. by Stephen Mitchell); Uncollected Poems: 1913–1918

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Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver except it’s playing from your neighbor’s radio that you can hear from your back porch, which you sit out on to relax in spite of the loud buzzing from the lightbulb and the hoards of moths that flock to it on summer evenings like this.

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Danusha Laméris, Bonfire Opera: Poems

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bell hooks, All About Love

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Sometimes there’s nothing to go back to but you still miss it so much

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