- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, 1876

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

Anne Sexton via wordedarchive

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

— William Faulkner

Imprison me in your name, let love kill me.

Mahmoud Darwish, from “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise”

Ama Codjoe, from Bluest Nude: Poems; “Bluest Nude”

[Text ID: “I crave. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”]

Rebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty; from 'Kintsugi 金継ぎ'

Miranda July, The First Bad Man

— Carol Rifka Brunt in Tell The Wolves I'm Home

"Days will pass, and you'll abandon things you were addicted to, and leave someone, and cancel a dream, and finally, accept a reality."

– Nizar Qabbani

"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot explain it to myself."

- Franz Kafka

- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, 1876

It was April and she was the saddest thing under the sun.

Khush Bakht via wordedarchive

The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognize in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex