Shahd

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh, 1856.

I love Anton Chekhov

— Kurt Vonnegut

be sure to follow me on goodreads. 

— Samuel Beckett, from a letter to Mania Peron featured in The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume II 1941-1956

— Samuel Beckett

Charles Baudelaire (b. 9 April 1821)

“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” - Richard Siken The Lament for Icarus - Herbert Draper

The fall of Icarus (detail) from the workshop of Bernard Picart, 1731.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; from ‘Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht’, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; from ‘lch habe viele Brüder in Sutanen’, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

Aleksandr Blok / Richard Siken / Donna Tartt / Rainer Maria Rilke.

I sat at my fine desk ... It's a respectably minded desk which is meant to educate. Where the writer's knees usually are, it has two horrible wooden spikes. And now pay attention. If you sit down quietly, cautiously at it, and write something respectable, all's well. But if you become excited, look out-if your body quivers ever so little, you inescapably feel the spikes in your knees, and how that hurts. I could show you the black-and-blue marks. And what that means to say is simply: "Don't write anything exciting and don't let your body quiver while you write."

for @moscardo

— T.S. Eliot (b. 26 September 1888)

— T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party