𝙾𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚋𝚎𝚛 𝟷𝟿𝟹𝟸 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝚘𝚏 𝙰𝚗𝚊𝚒̈𝚜 𝙽𝚒𝚗 𝟷𝟿𝟶𝟹-𝟷𝟿𝟽𝟽

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗    

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗  

𝙾𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚋𝚎𝚛 𝟷𝟻, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶 -𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹

— Sage Francis

[Text ID: “Whether you want it or not, in you sleeps a woman of war,”]

[text ID: And so it seems I must always write you letters that I can never send.]

[Text ID: “I still don’t know how / to love someone / without swallowing them.”]

[ID. October 4. I feel restless and vicious. Yesterday, before falling asleep, I had a flickering, cool little flame up in the left side of my head. The tension over my left eye has already settled down and made itself at home. When I think about it, it seems to me that I couldn’t hold out in the office even if they told me that in one month I’d be free. And most of the time in the office I do what I am  supposed to, am quite calm when I can be sure that my boss is satisfied, and do not feel that my condition is dreadful. By the way, last night I purposely made myself dull, went for a walk, read Dickens, then felt a little better and had lost the strength for sorrow. I still regarded the sorrow as justified but it seemed to have withdrawn somewhat, I looked at it from a distance and therefore hoped for better sleep. It was a little deeper too, but not enough, and often interrupted. I told myself, as consolation, that I had indeed once more repressed the great agitation in me but that I did not wish to succumb at once, as I had always done in the past after such occasions; rather, I wished to remain entirely conscious to the final flutterings of that agitation, which I had never done before. Perhaps in this way I would find hidden steadfastness in myself. END ID]

Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Octavio Paz, tr. by Eliot Weinberger, from “Letter of Testimony”, The Poems of Octavio Paz

Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

— Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Dorothy Brett, dated August 29, 1921

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

Susan Sontag, from “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963″