In Some Versions Of The Story It Wasn’t The Sun That Icarus Flew Too Close To- It Was The Ocean With

Her disintegration went down a shaft of phases, every one more racking than the last; for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (via quotespile)

I always preferred the company of the dead. You try complaining about your life, surrounded by their wailing. Call it perspective.  And the living, well, they can’t look at me for too long, without dissolving into their most basic parts, only good for my cousin’s touch. Nobody likes looking at their own mortality. Everybody wants to die a hero. They don’t want to meet me with my howling dogs and lingering nature and blank eyes. I’m not unkind, no matter what the other Deaths say. I allow lingering goodbyes, lovers to meet again, scores to be settled. Just ask Patroclus, his hands fading  as he watched his lover weep.

Melinoe (a.v.p)

Don’t you dare pity her She traded a suffering soul for a throne of bones She exchanged watchful eyes for a court of her own The seasons of the earth depended on the very breath she took She had death wrapped around her fingers and spring at her beck and call and the ruler of the heavens tasked with finding her She turned the world upside down to find freedom The daughter of flowers escaped her prison made out of roots and thorns and became the queen of death and forged her new home out of shadows and power

Persephone was the real winner (via starlightpoet)

“so maybe this bridge was always meant to burn / maybe we were handing the matches back and forth back and forth / waiting for someone to strike out / waiting for someone to say / okay this is enough / I need to see some light / I need to see some flames / let’s set this ablaze and not call the police / let’s close our eyes and run opposite ways / I think I need to get away from you for awhile / I think I need to make sure I can never come home to you again.”

— where did the fire go / it never kept us warm– lily rain

In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, our role is not a passive one. […] We engage the presence, the voice of the book. We allow it entry, though not unguarded, into our inmost. A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness. They exercise upon our imagination and desires, upon our ambitions and most cover dreams, a strange, bruising mastery. Men who burn books know what they are doing. The artist is the uncontrollable force; no western eye, since Van Gogh, looks on a cypress without observing in it the start of a flame. So, and in supreme measure, it is with literature. A man who has read Book XXIV of the Iliad - the night meeting of Priam and Achielles - or the chapter in which Alyosha Karamazov kneels to the stars, who has raid Montaigne’s chapter XX (Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir) and Hamlet’s use of it - and who is not altered, whose apprehension of his own life is unchanged, who does not, in some subtle yet radical manner, look on the room in which he moves, on those that knock at the door, differently - has read only with the blindness of physical sight. […] To read well is to take great risks. It is to make vulernable our identity, our self possession. In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream (Dostoyevsky tells of it). One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking backbone sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return. Feeling this fear, the mind gropes to a sharp awakening. So it should be when we take in hand a major work of literature or philosophy, of imagination or doctrine. It may come to possess us so completely that we go, for a spell, in fear of ourselves and in imperfect recognition. He who has read Kafka’s Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.

George Steiner, “Humane Literacy” from Language and Silence (via mesogeios)

If you tell a boy whose hair is curly and wild and who dresses in faded holey t-shirts that smell like worn cotton and home that he should comb his hair down for you and dress up nicer for you, then you are slowly killing him and replacing him with what you think he should have to be…for you. Do me a favor. Dont. This world needs more boys with wild hair and worn cotton shirts and if you cant appreciate him, let him go, because he does not need to be told that his comfort and style is wrong. He should be loved by someone who thinks that wild hair is beautiful, and that he is stunning in a suit or worn cotton or nothing at all, because that is what love is. Healthy love is accepting them as they came, with all their flaws and problems and quirks. You should not have to “fix” someone you love at all, if they are right for you, you will be able to grow together into better people. They might adapt around you as time goes on, and that is normal, growth and change is good and natural, but forcing change is brutal and mean. He deserves to be loved just the way he came to you, because someone thinks he is beautiful, and if you can’t do that, let him love someone who will.

Thoughts of things  (via burtonbutton)

everyone should read this

(via lottie360)

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (via merulae)

as she walks dead lilies bloom underneath her feet. The closest the underworld had to life

my late night thoughts on Persephone