annamaria16k

[annamaria16k]

“I lie in the shadow of poppies without desires, needs, remorse. I am flesh and dirt.”

— Lucian Blaga, from Wheatfield (tr. by Andrei Condrescu)

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“the flowers full of night… like sacred smoke”

— Nina Cassian, from “Part of a Bird” (trans. Brenda Walker & Andre Deletant), Life Sentence: Selected Poems

[annamaria16k]

when Nizar Qabbani said, "The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it" it hit me so damn hard

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There are some feelings you will never find words for; you will learn to name them after the ones who gave them to you.

- Maza Dohta

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Do you think it's possible that some people are born to give more love than they will ever get back in return?

- Tyler Knott Gregson

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An emptiness so vast I can’t tell

if I am in it or it in me.

— Richard Jackson

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Detached from everything, including detachment.

— Maurice Blanchot

[annamaria16k]

Octavio Paz, from The Poems Of Octavio Paz; “Concert in the Garden”

[annamaria16k]

THE FIRST DISCIPLE (2022) Tamino

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[annamaria16k]

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

[annamaria16k]

[annamaria16k]

“A voice belongs first to a body, then to a language. The language may change but the voice stays the same. I recognize your voice before I know in what language you are speaking. In the post office you pronounced the name you had written on the envelope, yet it was not the two words which I heard, it was your voice.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

[annamaria16k]

“You never experience the feeling of having gone far, in Paris. It’s always familiar. The unity of its architecture makes it shrink, because you constantly move between the sumptuous and the intimate. You never fall into wilderness. I look desperately for friendships, otherwise how could I face a city which is a stage for intimacy without meeting someone dear to my heart? Paris is a city for lovers because the decor is here, enhancing love’s absence to a maddening degree. Loneliness is therefore, ironically, of the essence of Paris, for no love can fulfill the expectations that the city creates. So, very often, I love the sky, or the rain, or the particular quality of the light that has just disappeared.”

— Etel Adnan, Paris, When It’s Naked

[annamaria16k]

Lovers,

Michael Ackerman.

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Juhea Kim, from Beasts of a Little Land

[Text ID: Love happens all at once, and also in stages.]

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“Κι όταν πεθάνω θά ‘θελα να με θάψουν σ'ένα σωρό από φύλλα ημερολογίου για να πάρω και το χρόνο μαζί μου. Κι ίσως ό,τι μένει από μας να'ναι στην άκρη του δρό- μου μας ένα μικρό μη μέ λησμόνει”

— Τ.λειβαδίτης “Φύλλα Ημερολογίου”

[annamaria16k]

“…Θα μπορούσα ακόμα και να χαμογελάσω στον άντρα που σ’ έχει δει γυμνή πριν από μένα,να του χαμογελάσω, που του δόθηκε μια τόση ατέλειωτη ευτυχία…”

— Τάσος Λειβαδίτης