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carolinefrances · 3 years

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Yes, I deserve a spring.

“Good-night, sweet princess. You are still on your own; be stoic; don’t panic; get through this hell to the generous sweet overflowing giving love of spring.” — Sylvia Plath

“Yes, yes. I want the spring…Lord help me. I’m suffocating.” — Clarice Lispector trans. Alison Entrekin

“I want nothing more than the promise of spring.” — Laura Purcell

“I feel the stirrings of faith that here, in this place, in my heart, spring will come again.” — Marya Hornbacher

“Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvellous error!— that a spring was breaking out in my heart.” — Antonio Machado trans. Robert Bly

“The first warm days of spring, give them to me: a tepid rain, crocus poking through last year’s leaves. Give me the heart of it: pale yellow, frail blue.” — Dorianne Laux

― Opening excerpt of “Flower Fairies of the Spring”, Mary Cicely Barker

“The humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.“ ― Octavio Paz trans. Eliot Weinberger

“Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and violets. Nothing can be forced to live. The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away, a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you. It says forget, you forget. It says begin again, you begin again.” — Louise Gluck

“It will be spring soon, it will be spring soon — And I, whose childhood is a forgotten boredom, feel like a child who comes on a scene of adult reconciling, and can understand nothing but the unusual laughter, and starts to be happy.” — Philip Larkin

— Illustration from Mary Cicely Barker, Lily-of-the-Valley flowers represent ‘the return of happiness’ and bloom in springtime

“The doves are cooing in the pine tree and spring will come — will come — will come.” — Anne Sexton

“I know better now how to handle loss, accept doubt, live with the unknown. I learned to wait for spring. Spring came.” — Marya Hornbacher

— “Wills Of The River”, First Aid Kit

“Spring is here spring is here spring spring is here! My blood is budding inside me.” ― Nazım Hikme trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

“Look, it’s spring again although you thought everything had been lost! Look, the drops glitter and tremble far out on the boughs of the trees! Look, the light, the shining clouds and feel: You live!”— Gunnar Ekelof trans. Leonard Nathan and James Larson

— “Spring”, Leon Wyczolkowski

“Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then—open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song may already be drifting away.” — Mary Oliver

“It’s spring, you’re young, you’re lovely, you have a right to be happy. Come back into the world.” — Shirley Jackson

“You shake the dust from your muscles and it smells of spring.” — Sara Eliza Johnson

— “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up)” music video, Florence + The Machine

“Your courage will still be shown in the little ways, each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen.” — Anne Sexton

“Fill yourself up with the forsythias and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too with your blood and happiness and wretchedness, the dark ground that seems to come with you.” ― Gottfried Benn trans. Michael Hofmann

— “Primavera”, Sandro Boticelli

“I am in a quiet way blooming.” — May Sarton

“She loved the rebirth of spring; her beautiful garden; the wild flowers of the fields; butterflies, toads and bees.” — Emily Fragos about Emily Dickinson

“Spring is a happiness so beautiful, so unique, so unexpected, that I don’t know what to do with my heart.” — Emily Dickinson

“For me this spring was the most painful and the loveliest of my life.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn trans. Michael Glenny

“It is spring, and the night wind is moist with the smell of turned loam and the early flowers; the moon pours out its beauty which you see as beauty finally, warm and offering everything.” ― Margaret Atwood

“There are times we must bury our broken hearts in the garden so that spring can do the work we cannot do ourselves. Living in the memory of what was eventually becomes a memory in itself. The years grow like flowers and the faint scent of love hangs low so that we may remember all of those we wish not to forget.” — Zella Day

— “The Secret Garden”, AURORA

“’Is the spring coming?’ he said. ‘What is it like? (…) It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth.’” — Frances Hodgson Burnett

— “The Secret Garden” (2020), dir. Marc Munden

“and the spring; a clumsy brightness of air” — E. E. Cummings

“It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth.” — Susanna Kaysen

“(…), to feel the spring, to renew my love affair with the world.” — Anais Nin

“Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts, and certainly visible. See how the violets are opening, and the leaves unfolding, the streams gleaming and the birds singing. What does it make you think of?” — Mary Oliver

― “The Edge of the Woods”, Charles Courtney Curran

“spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things, while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there)and without breaking anything.” — E. E. Cummings

“Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.” — Gustave Flaubert

“It was spring and the air was urgent with the perfume of fresh leaves and new flowers.” ― Joy Harjo

“There is a kind of smoke in the spring air, A smoke that takes the parks, the little statues With pinkness, as if a tenderness awoke, A tenderness that did not tire, something healing.” — Sylvia Plath

“Spring advanced rapidly; the weather became fine, and the skies cloudless. It surprised me that what before was desert and gloomy should now bloom with the most beautiful flowers and verdure. My senses were gratified and refreshed by a thousand scents of delight, and a thousand sights of beauty.” ― Mary Shelley

“Ah, God - for the flower-air of Spring! To see The world in bud! To press with eager feet The dear, soft, thrilling green again!” ― E.E. Cummings

― Detail of “Spring Awakening”, Hans Zatzka

“My love, seek the spring of life: in this meadow daffodils blossom a hundred times, nightingale sings with a thousand songs.“ ― Hafiz trans. Reza Ordoubadian

“Isn’t it wonderful - the cold wind and spring in the heart inexplicable. Darling girl. Picklock.” — Mary Oliver

“The spring is fresh and fearless and every leaf is new,/ The world is brimmed with moonlight,/ The lilac brimmed with dew.” — Sara Teasdale

“It was a fine spring morning in the forest as he started out. Little soft clouds played happily in a blue sky, skipping from time to time in front of the sun as if they had come to put it out, and then sliding away suddenly so that the next might have his turn. Through them and between them the sun shone bravely; and a copse which had worn its firs all the year round seemed old and dowdy now beside the new green lace which the beeches had put on so prettily.” — A. A. Milne

“Green leaves—you may believe this or not— have once or twice burst from the tips of my fingers somewhere deep in the woods, in the reckless seizure of spring.” — Mary Oliver

“Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.” — Rabindranath Tagore

“And now it’s spring, so my ideas are always so nice, sharp, inventive, and the dreams I have are tender; everything is rose-coloured.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky trans. Hugh Aplin

― “Springtime”, Emile Vernon

“In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon.” ― Wallace Stevens

“Tender as the world that wakes up again, despite. To pass through a season instead of scrubbing yourself with it is a little fate, a little luxury. I am so windchime, I am so porch swing, I am so in love with spring I want to wear it on my wrist like perfume. The deepest ache playing on repeat: there is nothing new here, except for everything.” — Topaz Winters

“The older I grow, the more do I love spring and spring flowers. Is it so with you?“ ― Emily Dickinson

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” — Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Stephen Mitchell

“I run out again, feather to the wind, full of wild expectations, out in the spring night… Hoping, desiring love. Wishing, dreaming.” — Anais Nin

“Yes - the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Stephen Mitchell

“In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?” — Mary Oliver

“Spring is the Period/ Express from God.” — Emily Dickinson

— “A Dream of Spring”, William Adolphe Bouguereau

“(…) The wings of angels where warm blood and a vague nostalgia still circulate, a memory not yet erased of a springtime air.” — Dulce Maria Loynaz trans. James O’Connor

“And outside the door, nature. The spinning, breathtaking cathedral of the sky arches above the trees, trees that bend lush and neon green in spring—all buds, then bloom. Sudden rain breaks the tender leaves from their stems and lays the floor thick with a bright carpet.” ― Carmen Maria Machado

“Spring’s pardon comes, a sweetening of the air, the light made fairer by an hour, time as forgiveness, granted in the murmured colouring of flowers, rain’s mantra of reprieve, reprieve, reprieve.” — Carol Ann Duffy

“I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me to love the world, making it impossible to turn away completely, to shut it out completely ever again - it is everywhere; when I close my eyes, birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring.” — Louise Gluck

“As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic, it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that makes an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself.” — Elizabeth Goudge

“Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition. And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.” ― Mary Oliver

― “In the Garden”, Francis Coates Jones

“And still the mad magnificent herald spring assembles beauty from forgetfulness.” ― E. E. Cummings

“None the less: I will. Ease back. Once again. Yes. Exactly. As does Spring.“ ― Olena Kalytiak Davis

“Again & again that law of starting over: spring anyway. So spring. I know that story.” — Emily Skaja

“Surely spring will allow a girl without a stitch on to turn softly in her sunlight and not be afraid of her bed. She has already counted seven blossoms in her green green mirror.” — Anne Sexton

— “Spring”, Sir John Lavery

“Yes, I deserve a spring — I owe nobody nothing.” — Virginia Woolf

“You are not dead, no. You are reborn with the roses, in every spring.” — Juan Ramon Jimenez trans. Hoffman Reynolds Hays

— “The River” music video, AURORA

“On the first day of spring all the flowers are still waiting to be born, hanging out around the bones that used to be bodies, that used to hold other bodies inside them.” — Sarah Xerta

“Do you see the small branches? Can you touch their budding greenery? Do you hear the heartbeat throbbing in them? Bring that bough closer to you. Let it touch your arms. Think of yourself as its sap, let your forearm become a canvas for it to draw its leaves, the freedom a child feels when he touches his eyelids in the mirror.” ― Saadi Youssef trans. Khaled Mattawa

— Detail of “The Knight of the Flowers”, Georges Rochegrosse

“Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.” — Sylvia Plath

“Spring is the season of the heart. Its arrival and departure are felt in the heart more than in the fields.” — Shubhangi Swarup

— “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up), Florence + The Machine

“There is a spring under the ground/ the resurrection not of the dead/ but of the living.” — Etel Adnan trans. Kamal Boullata

“And every spring on the rotting burial mound new grass grows.” ― Ursula Starke trans. Jonathan Simkins

“Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.” — Margaret Atwood

“Never let death take the place of life. Not even a little. Take back the garden while there’s good light and a cool rain. The green buds are beginning to show. Don’t let them get tangled in the skeleton of the old rosebush, where the spring’s effort is all for nothing, and so, too, the warmth of this eager earth.” — Dulce Maria Loynaz trans. James O’Connor

“In the gold mouth of a flower the black smell of spring earth. No more skulls on our desks but the pervasive testing of death— as if we had need of new ways of dying? No, we have no need of new ways of dying. Death in us goes on testing the wild chance of living, (…) Calavera of Spring. Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air, knowing air also means music to sing to.” — Denise Levertov

“I wish, all my poems to end in, to end with, spring.” ― Olena Kalytiak Davis

"Persephone had it right. If you must go, might as well take all of spring with you.” ― Cathy Linh Che

“I believe in the life of the grasses and spring without end.” ― Steinunn Sigurðardóttir trans. Bernard Scudder

“Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived lightly in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?” — James Longenbach

🤝

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