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May Sarton, from "The Autumn Sonnets", Selected Poems

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Jour de brume

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— Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to Theo

[text ID: but the sunflower is mine in a way.]

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Madeleine: Anatomy of a Nightmare, 1974

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“Old splendours, cascading star-gold tears from blue skies.”

— Arthur Rimbaud, from Selected Poems & Letters; “The Hands of Jean-Marie,”

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“This only will I grant unto you: that you retain your own speech, and there shall be no music in the world equal to yours, the plaintive music you shall sing.”

— The Fate of the Children of Lir, A Celtic Literature Collective

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“Please — consider me a dream.”

— Franz Kafka; ‘Once while visiting his friend Max Brod, young Kafka awakened Brod’s father, who was asleep on a couch. Instead of apologizing, Kafka gently montioned him to relax, advanced through the room on tiptoe, and said softly: “Please – consider me a dream.”’ from Franz Kafka (Franz Baumer) (via auroses)

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Emily Brontë, from “Wuthering Heights“

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Alejandra Pizarnik, The Galloping Hour: French Poems

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Ono no Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, tr. by Jane Hirshfield & Mariko Aratani, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

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Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

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“And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.”

— Robert Penn Warren, from Saturday Review (22 March 1958)

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Max Dupain. Street at Central. 1939

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“Winter evening” Cherepovets, Russia

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Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.

Maria Popova, “The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear” (via soracities)