it's immortality my darlings

All praise to the inexhaustible labyrinth of cause and effect which, before unveiling to me the mirror where I shall see no one or some other self, has granted me this perfect contemplation of a language at its dawn.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Embarking on the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar," from Selected Poems

— John Ashbery, from “Proximity”, Wakefulness: Poems

when mary oliver said “i tell you this to break your heart by which i mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world” and when warsan shire said “ya allah if it’ll keep my heart soft, break my heart every day”

also elena ferrante “she was taking on the job of sticking a pin in my heart, not to stop it but to make it beat harder”

and ross gay “in witnessing someone’s being touched, we are also witnessing someone’s being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. and witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another can hurt. until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening”

and ellen bass “you may have to break your heart but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive” and jenny slate “i’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts” and marie howe “art helps us to let our heart break open, rather than close” 

Mary Oliver, Everything

Devin Kelly, from “The Old Catcher Considers the Failing of His Knees"

December 20, 1927 Virginia Woolf, “A Writer’s Diary” (1918 - 1941)

﹙ Text ID: I’ll cry about this earth in heaven too.﹚

“I feel very small. I don't understand. I have so much courage, fire, energy, for many things, yet I get so hurt, so wounded by small things.”

“I have died for the smallest things. Nothing washes off”

Devin Kelly, from "My Mother, the Day She Knows the Ones Who Died ​in the Shooting"

tragic overliving as being unable to escape the story you’re in, from emily wilson’s mocked with death

Past Lives, Future Bodies, K-Ming Chang

I Know Your Kind, William Brewer

against death by Noor Hindi

nicole homer, underbelly

{Hannah Green, from "Are you still hungry, Mother?"/ Unknown/Sam Gordon, "A Mother's Hate"/ Ella Wilson/ Joan Tierney/ Ella Wilson/ Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous/ Unknown/ Nayyirah Waheed/ Sharon Olds, “Holding To A Wall, Treading Saltwater”/ John Green, Turtles All the Way Down/ Safia Elhillo, "an inheritance," published in Narrative Northeast/ Annie Ernaux, from I Remain in Darkness/ Poplar Street by Chen Chen/ Unknown/ Tumblr User: @inkskinned/ Elena Poniatowska, from "La Flor de Lis," published c. January 2011/ Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom}

Emily Dickinson (1871)

The Green Ray (1986) dir. Éric Rohmer cinematography by Sophie Maintigneux