quaintoldtales

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Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

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Ring, 1700s, with the inscription, “Many are the stars i see but in my eye no star like thee.”

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She liked wine and she was strong. Dark hair. Eyes that showed a great depth of feeling and character. But she was confused and life had been cruel to her. It's easy to be confused when you don't know who you are or what you want. So she chose to grow and live and thrive on nothing in particular except the promise of another day. Sometimes that's enough.

a short story by matthew marcel

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“Once you leave someone, the dream becomes divided. Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality.”

— Yanyi, from “Dream of the Divided Field,” New England Review (vol. 42, no. 3, 2021)

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Haruki Murakami, from Norwegian Wood

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Alain de Botton // Jon Kabat-Zinn // unknown

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jasper texas 1998, Lucille Clifton

[ID: hope bleeds slowly from my mouth]

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“Where my friend awakens, there is no snow. / Can you imagine it? / She must step into her grief in a world full of sun.”

— — Rachel Mennies, from “December 11, 2016,” The Naomi Letters

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“You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.”

—  Anna Akhmatova

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“I leave all the scarlet flowers For the woman I love And hiding my tears from her I pick The flower of forgetfulness.”

— Yamakawa Tomiko, from “I leave”; Women Poets of Japan (tr. by Kenneth Rexroth)  

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“I tell my heart to be patient, that joy returns, but it doesn’t want to listen. It wants to tell me that the storm comes toward us, heavy with each named grief, and slams all the windows in the empty house.”

— Kim Addonizio, from “Ranchos de Taos, August” (via voirlvmer)

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““I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.””

— Italo Calvino (From Lewis Hyde’s website)

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Rebecca Solnit, Hope In The Dark

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Naples, 1952. Photo by David Seymour.