to be in love with him makes life no great mystery

(@chloeinletters on instagram)

— Franz Kafka, from a diary entry c. August 1916, featured in “Diaries,”

“I’m incurable”; Phantom Thread (2017)

richard siken, clementine von radics

Ada Limon, The Good Fight // Mary Oliver, West Wind // Danez Smith, Bare // Sappho, Fragment 58.25-26 // Mitski, I Don’t Smoke // Ashe Vernon // Hozier, Cherry Wine // Shauna Barbosa, GPS // Richard Siken, Little Beast // Chen Chen, Summer [The sunflowers fall…] // Warsan Shire // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

Audre Lorde, from “A Litany for Survival”, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

THIS FLAMENCO SINGER GETS IT

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

— Elena Ferrante, from “The Days of Abandonment.”

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

— Marilyn Hacker, from “Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons.”

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Octavio Paz, tr. by Eliot Weinberger, from “In the Middle of This Phrase…”, The Poems of Octavio Paz

[Text ID: “Ask nature what love is. / Silence is answer enough.”]

You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of beloved if you glimpse a future where beloved is no more

— Franz Kafka; Letters to Milena