Ad-meliora-tendo - I Strive To Higher Things

The 16 types as their icks!!

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already well into november but i thought i’d post (with pdfs included of course) some things i read (& loved) in october b/c it was a hard month & these writings held my hand the whole way through 

‘by grand central station i sat down and wept,’ elizabeth smart (!)

‘life and death,’ andrea dworkin 

‘seam,’ tarfia faizullah (!)

‘play it as it lays,’ joan didion 

‘war of the foxes,’ richard siken

‘midwinter day,’ bernadette mayer

‘in the pines,’ alice notley

‘death is not an option,’ suzanne rivecca (!)

‘the dead and the living,’ sharon olds

‘the melancholy of anatomy,’ shelley jackson

‘edinburgh,’ alexander chee

‘the woman destroyed,’ simone de beauvoir (!)

‘monster: poems,’ robin morgan

‘how we became human,’ joy harjo

‘ayiti,’ roxane gay (!) 

‘our andromeda,’ brenda shaughnessy

‘second childhood,’ fanny howe

‘the lady in the looking glass,’ virginia woolf

Few quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.

i need a girlfriend to talk about literature and pretty paintings!! accepting applications now!!

my favorite latin phrases

serva me, servabo te- save me and I will save you

venti, vidi, vici- I came, I saw, I conquered

capax infiniti- holding infinity

ita vero- thus indeed

mea vita- my life (in reference to someone)

amata- beloved

ad astra per aspera- to the stars through difficulties

stēllāns- having the appearance of stars

amera vita- love life

Gras es noster- The future is ours

relatable deaths from ancient times

chrysippus: died laughing at his own joke

zeuxis: died laughing at his own art

aeschylus: stayed outside in his old age to avoid a prophecy that he would die from having something fall on his head, died when an eagle thought his bald head was a rock and dropped a turtle on him to break its shell

plato: partied too hard

empedocles: jumped into a volcano to prove that he was immortal

philitas of cos: was such an incredible pedant that he wasted away while studying erroneous word usage

saint lawrence: roasted alive during christian persecution under valerian, joked that he was done on one side and needed to be flipped over

didius julianus: purchased the roman empire in an auction, ruled for 9 weeks, executed for being ineffective leader

petronius arbiter: sentenced to death by nero, opened his veins while enjoying a sumptuous dinner party, edited his will to list all of the reasons he hated nero

types of dark academia

classic academia: beige trench coats, wool sweaters. plaid skirts. think femme fatale, but educated. sobbing in bed late at night over the secret history or dead poets society. tea with milk and sugar. subsequent tea stains.

darkest academia: running through the rain, dimly lit by streetlights. brown tweed jackets, dress shoes. cold fingers and colder gazes. french-pressed black coffee, piping hot. dark, candlelit rooms with ancient wood floors/walls. 

light academia: white cable-knit sweaters, sparkly eyes and foggy glasses. going to art museums and falling in love with every portrait, every sculpture. caressing the petals of a rose, hearing the crinkle of leaves underfoot.

witchy academia: burning candles while reading or doing homework. black turtlenecks, velvet skirts. walking through the forest in autumn. passing a graveyard and feeling a greyish presence. waiting anxiously for samhain.

romantic academia: writing flowery poetry about someone you’ll never speak to (guilty oops). a cozy alizarin sweater, pleated skirts. slow dancing around your room to the beatles. curling up with warm, pallid cups of tea and a book.

scholarly academia: impeccable notes in class. leather bound bags crammed with textbooks and pens. lots of coffee with scones, and even more late nights. a wide vocabulary (that people constantly comment on). lives in the library.

theatre academia: shakespeare, all the time - quoting, reading, praying for a school production of a midsummer nights dream. or the crucible. memorizing lines in the wings. taking on your character’s traits, even outside the theater.

“We read to know we’re not alone.” - William Nicholson, Shadowlands

“I love you. You’re deliciously uncotemporary; you belong to a mystical past and also to a very remote future. For you, time isn’t money, it’s a precious essence, delicate, full of mystery. Just to breathe with someone like you does me good.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, tr. by Richard Howard, from “The Rock Garden,”

Any quotes which make you shudder?

GLAD YOU ASKED:

“I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.” —Richard Siken from “Little Beast”“You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.”—Marilyn Hacker from “Nearly a Valediction”“I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you and never walk back out. “—Nico Alvarado from “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls”“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”—Margaret Atwood from “The Good Bones”“When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.”—Bob Hicok from “Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem”“When I haven’t been kissed in a long time, I create civil disturbances, then insult the cops who show up, till one of them grabs me by the collar and hurls me up against the squad car, so I can remember, at least for a moment, what it’s like to be touched.”—Jeffrey McDaniel, “When a Man Hasn’t Been Kissed”“Kiss the mouth which tells you, here,here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.”—Galway Kinnell from “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”“I will love you forever; whatever happens. Until I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, until I find you again.”—Phillip Pullman from “The Amber Spyglass”“I wanted to write ‘stay’ on your sides,surround your bed with oceans of salt.I hope he folds you into a fox, loves you like a splintered arrow, brandishes the kill of your lips. May the bouquet of your hips wither. May the wolves forget your name.”—J. Bradley“I love you. If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.”–Elaine Dundy from “The Dud Avocado”“And I’d choose you; in a hundred different lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”—Kiersten White“The first time I asked you on a date, after you hung up, I held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, ‘You will fall in love with me. Then, just months later, you will fall out. I will pretend the entire time that I don’t know it’s coming.’”—Miles Walser “I will come back from the dead for you.”—Richard Siken from “You Are Jeff”“Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”—Richard Siken from “Wishbone”“Here we are, at the place where I get to beg for it. Where I get to say ‘Please,for just one night, will you lay down next to me? We can leave our clothes on,we can stay all buttoned up?’ But we both know how it goes–– I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.”—Richard Siken from “Wishbone”“Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.”—Jeffrey McDaniel