― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“The agony is exquisite, is it not? A broken heart. You think you will die. But you just keep living. Day after day, after terrible day.”

― Great Expectations (2011) dir. Brian Kirk

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.”

― Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones

“You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.”

— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”

@achillics, vulnerability

Joan Tierney (x)

Richard Siken, Wishbone

Ada Limón, The Good Fight

José Olivarez, I Wake in a Field of Wolves with the Moon

Lady Gaga, Judas

@bipeds (x)

Tom Lehrer, The Masochism Tango

Yves Olade, When Rome Falls

Florence + The Machine, Kiss With a Fist

Schuyler Peck, Horoscope for the Heartbroken

Venetta Octavia, I Set It in Stone

@heavensghost, Dead Girls Don’t Lie

Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain

Dead Girl Walking, from Heathers: The Musical

Terrence Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Richard Siken, Primer for the Small Weird Loves