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“Ugliness is a pathway to intimacy. You can’t have intimacy without trust, and you can’t have trust without vulnerability. In order to be vulnerable, you have to reveal parts of yourself that are dismissed as capital-U Ugly. There’s also this piece around disability — the interdependence of disability is inescapable. I feel like access is not a burden, it’s an amazing opportunity to be generative, to deepen community, relationships, everything.

When I think about intimacy and its connections to beauty, I feel like it’s more connected to ugliness than beauty. I think the only way that we can build intimacy is through ugliness. For example, there is something very magnificent about how disabled people build access to intimacy — that kind of intimacy that comes with not being afraid to state your access needs. Not beauty, but the magnificence or the learned experiences that ugliness teaches you on how to survive. People see this as an extremist thing, but what I’m saying is that it’s been a way in my life to not let go of people, and to live in that interdependence that doesn’t always feel revolutionary and good. Sometimes it fucking sucks — sometimes you just want to be able to take a walk by yourself. Sometimes it sucks to have to depend on someone to help you take a walk by yourself.

There are times when it’s incredibly hard. I’ve learned and we have all learned so many different pieces of how to survive, how to be and thrive within our lived experiences. The alternative is to pretend it away, but I also think there is something with disability that doesn’t allow you to turn away. You could try to pretend it away even though your reality is not such. But there’s a concreteness to me about disability that doesn’t allow you to pretend it away.

Shitty things happen. Ugliness is all around us all the time. Sometimes shit is not beautiful and that’s okay, that’s actually more generative, there is a depth to that. If I was able-bodied and I didn’t fall all the time, I would never know that experience and that depth. There have been so many amazing strangers who have helped me pick up all of my things from the sidewalk, from the floor, helped me get some ice. All of these pieces of everyday life are so connected to those moments of intimacy. There’s something in that.”

Why Ugliness is Vital in the Age of Social Media - Mia Mingus

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Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

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the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.

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—On Love, Marina Tsvetaeva

[text ID: I just want a humble, murderously simple thing: that a person be glad when I walk into the room.]

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗    

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"Yet each man kills the thing he loves. By each let this be heard. Some do it with a bitter look. Some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword"

-Oscar Wilde

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“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.”

— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

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“Had my silence really been a silence, or a loud voice that is mute?”

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

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Karl Briullov, The Last Day of Pompeii / Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

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Auguste Rodin Amour et psyché

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Yes, my strength is in solitude. I'm not afraid of stormy rains or the great loose winds, because I too am the dark of the night.

-Clarice Lispector

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May Sarton, from Journal of a Solitude [ID in alt text]

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Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vanessa Bell written c. August 1908

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Roses filmed by Arthur Edward Pillsbury, c. 1925 (in colour).

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It's beautiful how one heart opens itself to another heart and two lives share dreams and sorrows and two hands entwine perfectly against each other and two souls become one.

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"am I being annoying" are you aware that my heart is trying to crawl out of my chest to get to you

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― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot