to-speak-or-to-die

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— Sylvia Plath, from "Letters Home"

[text ID: I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still.]

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“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

— John Burroughs

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—  You, Darkness by Rainer Maria Rilke

[text ID: I have faith in nights.]

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— Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, December 1881

[text ID: I must endure bad times and the waters will rise, possibly as high as the lips and possibly even higher, how can I know beforehand? But I’ll fight my fight and sell my life dearly and try to win and pull through.]

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  ― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

[text ID: To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.]

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Small Wire, Anne Sexton

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Frances Ha, 2012

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we thought of our new ghostliness our liquid selves without resources or luck when the sky would reappear how we would redraw our edges then and with what

— Rebecca Perry, from “beaches (4),” Stone Fruit

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“Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don’t let it go.”

— — Doris Lessing, from her Nobel lecture “On not winning the Nobel Prize” 

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—Tokio Blues (Norwegian Wood), Haruki Murakami (trad. Lourdes Porta Fuentes)

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—When Marnie Was There, Joan G. Robinson

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“A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”

—George Forester (played by Colin Firth), A Single Man (script by Tom Ford and David Scearce)

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“But even as she wept, a new and delicious sadness was creeping over her. The sadness one feels for something enjoyed and now over, rather than for something lost and never found again.”

—When Marnie Was There, Joan G. Robinson

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“If I ever wonder what I'm doing or where I'm going, I just think of myself as that little kid I was, when I was just about this tall, and I say, 'well, now, would he be proud of me?' If the answer is 'no', well, then I just keep walking on through, but if the answer is 'yes', then, I know I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.”

—Forrest Tucker (played by Robert Redford), The Old Man & The Gun (script by David Lowery)

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“Marnie flung her arms round Anna's waist. 'You don't know how much I wanted someone like you to play with! Will you be my friend for ever and ever?' And she would not be satisfied until they had drown a circle round them in the sand, and holding hands, vowed eternal friendship. Anna had never been so happy in her life.”

—When Marnie Was There, Joan G. Robinson

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“She stood there looking and listening and thinking about nothing, drinking in the great quiet emptiness of marsh and water and sky, which now seemed to match her own small emptiness inside.”

—When Marnie Was There, Joan G. Robinson