— Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey), Olivia (1949)

love as a wound

Olivia, Dorothy Strachey || The Roots Around my Ribcage, Seyda Noire || Saint Catherine Drinks the Blood of Christ, Francesco Vanni || The Last Motel Before a Decade's Long Purgatory, Silas Denver Melvin || Roberto Ferri || The Stream of Life, Clarice Lispector || Underbelly, Nicole Homer || The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Guercino || The Encounter, Louise Gluck || The Waves, Virginia Woolf

so that was what love led to. to wound and be wounded.

brute: poems - emily skaja, belovéd - yves olade, lie from peripety (2008) - jen mazza, we are hard - margaret atwood, tumblr user @heavensghost, olivia (1949) - dorothy bussy (née strachey).

“Yet oh! I sighed, how willingly I would die to make her happy.”

"I understand,” I cried to myself, “I understand at last. Life, life, life, this is life, full to overflowing with every ecstasy and every agony. It is mine, mine to hug, to exhaust, to drain.

Olivia by Dorothy Strachey

"For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: "Is this real? Is this sincere?" All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: "Literature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about! And then I would add, "But so Mercutio jested as he died!""

Olivia, Dorothy Strachey Bussy (1949)

Thinking about them

Dorothy Strachey, Olivia: A Novel (1949)

I sat on my bed and tried to compose myself.  And still, do what I would, hope came to interfere with my thoughts, my resolves.  How hard it is to kill hope!  Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death.  Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life.  Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instill its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.

Dorothy Strachey, “Olivia”

OLIVIA by Dorothy Strachey

None of my doubts were ever solved with any certainty. I still sometimes puzzle over them. I am still constantly baffled. Psychological or material objections seem to block the way to every solution, and yet the solution, we know, exists; it is there, like a lost jewel, close at hand perhaps, if only some power would give us eyes to see it.

Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

André Aciman in his introduction to the 2020 edition of Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia.

[Olivia][Dorothy Strachey]

Clicca qui per acquistare il libro Titolo: OliviaScritto da: Dorothy StracheyTitolo originale: OliviaTradotto da: Carlo FrutteroEdito da: Astoria edizioniAnno: 2024Pagine: 160ISBN: 9788833211763 Delicata confessione in equilibrio tra l’innocenza della giovinezza e le ambiguità del mondo adulto, Olivia è un romanzo ambientato nel collegio francese di Les Avons, dove la protagonista, sedicenne,…

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“it was i alone who loved — it was i alone whose love was an impossible fantasy”

— dorothy strachey

Just started reading Olivia and oh man 8 pages in I’m already going crazy going stupid “love has always been the chief business of my life” shut up “nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own” shut UP

“In the meantime, I brush her hair and go on my knees before her and cut her nails. That is enough for me. It wouldn’t be for you. Your share has been something more. But you have had to pay for it.”

Cut me like a knife