♡ Here’s A Little Garden ♡

“She had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”

— Kate Chopin, from The Awakening, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”

— John Keats, excerpt of “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”, in John Keats: The Complete Poems

Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

from the for love & lemons’ rtw summer 2o18 collection. 

“The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves, Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blossoms called innocence.”

— Walt Whitman, Warble for Lilac-Time

“Give me that dark moment I will carry it everywhere like a mouthful of rain.”

— Mary Oliver, from Pen And Paper And A Breath Of Air in “Blue Pastures”

Sunrise. Atlantic Ocean. Raining. North Florida. Ponte Vedra Beach. March 1, 2021

@finita--la--commedia

“There are rivers sweetly perfumed with lavender in my soul.”

— Anna de Noailles, tr. by Jethro Bithell, from Poems; “In The Garden,”

“[The sea] says nothing, explains nothing, teaches no lesson. And still it is a good idea to lend an ear. Listening to this empty noise is nothing but living, staying within ourselves…”

— Jean-Michel Maulpoix, “They look at blue but will never know how to say it”, A Matter of Blue: Poems (trans. Dawn M. Cornelio)

“The divine is not human; it is something quite different. And it is not noble or sublime or spiritualized, as one likes to believe. It is alien and repellent and sometimes it is madness. It is malignant and dangerous and fatal. Or so I have found it. And I well know the stench of it - the sour goat-stench - who should know it better than I?”

- Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl.