“You laugh like a little girl, and inside you think like a martyr.”

— The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky 

Mirror (1975)

“The spring, April sunshine, / It’s a blessing; it’s a blessing.”

— Jackie Kay, from Bantam: Poems; “April Sunshine,”

Mary Oliver, from “Marengo.” [ID in alt text]

Christa Wolf, from “Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays”

“From the base of her neck to the arch of her eyelids her beauty made a slave of me.”

— Adonis, from ‘Transformations of the Lover’, The Pages of Day and Night (trans. Samuel Hazo)

Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

Dulce María Loynaz, tr. by James O’Connor, from Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems

[Text ID: “There was a humble sadness within you, which nobody seemed to notice, like a puddle that reflected the sky all day long.”]

Jenny Xie, from "Zuihitsu",  Eye Level

Anton Chekhov, "after the theatre"

Laura Blue

Beach Day, 2022

Oil on canvas

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor- such is my idea of happiness.

— Leo Tolstoy, The Book of Life (1896). (Posrednik. The Intermediary. Patriotism or Peace. A Letter to Manson, January 2, 1896). (via Make Believe Boutique)

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

Le Bassin de nymphéas

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Ingeborg Bachmann, from Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems; “Great Landscape Near Vienna”

Text ID: What separates you, is you. Wash away, / return wise,