don't you dare, for one minute, believe that my kindness makes me anything but insurmountable. i did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt, and stagger back, wounded and alive, just to hear you call me weak for trying. | - ashe vernon

Winter Recipes from the Collective Louise Glück

I Opened My Veins, Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Elaine Feinstein)

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose; "An Experience,"

— Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis and Other Stories”

George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard from, “Memory I.”

Ranata Suzuki

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

Sharon Olds, from "Little Things"; Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“In the beginning was the sea—we heard the surf in our breathing, certain that we carried seawater in our veins.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, excerpt of “Traveling Musicians”, in Dancing in Odessa

having to come to terms with the fact that love is not an everlasting performance in which you attempt to retain the attention of your significant other but rather a release of control and putting faith into them and trusting them to choose to stay with you no matter what you have to offer

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.

The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard

Introducing yourself to people is so embarrassing. Like hey this is my stupid fucking name, I enjoy exactly 3 things, and am clearly anxious. please don't immediately hate me