reds-poppy

[reds-poppy]

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles, 2011

[reds-poppy]

If you have to go, you know I will go with you.

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles, 2011

[reds-poppy]

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles, 2011

[reds-poppy]

The October sunlight lacquered her skin and hair. Around her, the trees on the property wore traces of gold, as if they'd donned it just for her, for the moment she'd step outside.

Roshani Chokshi, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, 2023

[reds-poppy]

But they do not know us. They know neither the contours of our hearts nor the cold hands that shaped them.

Roshani Chokshi, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, 2023

[reds-poppy]

The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.

Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel), Kafka on the Shore, 2002

[reds-poppy]

The purity of her beauty gives me a feeling close to sadness — a very natural feeling, though one that only something extraordinary could produce.

Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel), Kafka on the Shore, 2002

[reds-poppy]

He felt as though he were dissolving, like a pearl in wine; soon he would be reduced to a mere streak of iridescence in the dim air.

Bridget Collins, The Silence Factory, 2024

[reds-poppy]

I was carried, like a good wife, on the tide of another's desire, even though it bore me away from everything I held dear.

Bridget Collins, The Silence Factory, 2024

[reds-poppy]

"There's no such thing as a weed," Caz said. "That's a cruel term made up by people who label some plants as 'unwanted' and some as 'valuable,' as if the worth of a living thing is measured by how useful it is to another living thing. As if a plant can't have its own intrinsic worth."

Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop, 2024

[reds-poppy]

What was it I was feeling, why did I suddenly want to cry, why did it feel like my heart was broken, the kind of grief you feel when something you have lost still exists? The water gave no answer, nor did the mountains, but the air around me was sparklingly clear.

Gunnhild Øyehaug (trans. Kari Dickson), "Birds," Evil Flowers, 2023

[reds-poppy]

I flowered up like ivy beneath her touch. And now, as we set off into the purple dusk, I can feel myself still growing, budding, blooming.

Ava Reid, Fable for the End of the World, 2025

[reds-poppy]

As we step out of the cabin for the last time, hand in hand, I feel a tug of grief. I came to life within its four flimsy walls, like a corpse reanimated and lifted from its grave. I'll never be the creature I was when I first walked through the door. I'll never drift into that dreamless, annihilating slumber again.

Ava Reid, Fable for the End of the World, 2025

[reds-poppy]

Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels — not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses. It holds no possibility of opposition. And even when the oceans come, and come and come and come in a seamless reel, and there's no sense of land or anything but polished blue, and every country you've ever heard of seems to have slid in to the cavern of space, even then there's no waiting for anything else.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital, 2023

[reds-poppy]

You could know the earth inside out, in its little hollow of space. You could never really comprehend the stars, but the earth you could know in the way you know another person, in the way he came quite studiedly and determinedly to know his wife. With a yearning that's hungry and selfish. He wishes to know it, inch by inch.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital, 2023

[reds-poppy]

When at last they came to the bottom of the gorge they found that evening had fallen in the deep places. The sun was gone. Twilight lay upon the waterfalls.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, 1955

[reds-poppy]

All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half shouting at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to you is both.

Ada Limón, "Cargo," The Carrying, 2018