unfortunately i Do feel better when i clean my living space and eat enough fruits and veggies and go outside and generally remember i am a mammal :| real pity that knowing this does not make it easier to do those things

Tara Will, The Final Days of Summer, 2019, Pastel on paper

{Richard siken from the war of foxes/Doc Luben, Love Letters or Suicide Notes}

Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

babe are u okay ur crying about closeness lines over time by olivia de recat again

having so much love in your heart is beautiful and amazing right up until you’re alone in your bedroom clutching at your chest and whimpering like a wounded dog

sometimes I wonder how we all survive and then I look at my best friends and I go “oh, I survive because I don’t want to leave you yet” and it makes sense. life is so hard a lot of the time, but I want one more bowl of pasta with you.

Cathy Park Hong, from "Spring and All"

“Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happiness.”

— Irène Némirovsky, from Jezebel (Vintage, 2010; first published 1936)

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.

The Four Generations of Chang E - Zen Cho

Don't get sucked into the "if they really cared I wouldn't have to say something" spiral. No matter how close you are with someone, it's unfair to expect them to know things you haven't actually communicated.

Alice Walker, from “Even As I Hold You”, Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990

I have always thought that as an editor for twenty years I understood writers better than their most careful critics, because in examining the manuscript in each of its subsequent stages I knew the author’s process, how his or her mind worked, what was effortless, what took time, where the ‘solution’ to a problem came from. The end result—the book—was all that the critic had to go on. Still, for me, that was the least important aspect of the work. Because, no matter how 'fictional’ the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our 'flooding.’

Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, 1995 (via thelonguepuree)

Devin Kelly, All that wanting, right?