wind-of-vittra

[wind-of-vittra]

You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude […] but the time for puncturing had come. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts  (via 89words)

[wind-of-vittra]

“How can I teach her some way of being human that won’t destroy her? I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin.”

— Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986, ‘Solstice Poem’ by Margaret Atwood

[wind-of-vittra]

and I set myself shaking, sawing off my branches so they will not wave in the winds, for the storm I cannot change. but I miss the way they sought the sunshine. I miss how easy, green, my leaves slept through the summer. I miss it– but now it is winter and it is a gale and all I can do is shiver. 

[wind-of-vittra]

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

[wind-of-vittra]

…I have often dreamed of those fires…

Albert Camus, from a lecture titled “Create Dangerously,”  (via 89words)

[wind-of-vittra]

It’s a dark place, not knowing. It’s difficult to surrender to. But I guess it’s where we live most of the time. I guess it’s where we all live, so maybe it doesn’t have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.

Nina LaCour, We Are Okay  (via 89words)

[wind-of-vittra]

“You do not know to what extent I guard myself, and my feelings. It is strange how you get truth from me.”

— Anaïs Nin in a letter to Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin Henry Miller, 1932-1953

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Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[wind-of-vittra]

…it was a surprise, the first time that she had been alone with her heart and so conscious of it, and its beat was like the slow drip of a reassuring reply to anxiously repressed questions. It felt like the aftermath of grief, a happy melancholy, as if she’d been crying, as if, after years of pain and constriction, fetters had been taken off her—at last, at last.

– Joseph Roth, from “The Blind Mirror,” The Collected Stories (Norton, 2002)

[wind-of-vittra]

[wind-of-vittra]

“I laughed and said, ‘Life is easy.’ What I meant was, ‘Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.’”

— Miranda July

[wind-of-vittra]

Ilya Kaminsky, ‘And While Puppeteers Are Arrested’, Deaf Republic

[Text ID: “silence? it is a stick I beat you with, I beat you with a stick, voice, beat you

until you speak, until you speak right.”]

[wind-of-vittra]

Not nice.

[wind-of-vittra]

Poems & Words

[wind-of-vittra]

“(…) I’ve many things to do today - I Need to kill and kill again My memory, turn my heart to stone, (…)”

— Anna Akhmatova, from Prologue in “Poems: Anna Akhmatova [translated by D. M. Thomas]

[wind-of-vittra]

E.M. Forster, Maurice

[wind-of-vittra]

“Unravel” - a visual metaphor for fear. 

Ink and colored pencil.