metaphorformetaphor:

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar…

—  William Faulkner, from The Sound and the Fury (Harrison Smith, 1929)

(via thesofthuman)

wolfishgirl:

“Somewhere a man tells a woman she is not as alone as she thinks and she understands she is precisely as alone.”

— Anne Michaels, from ‘Somewhere Night is Falling’, All We Saw (via soracities)

(via clarev)

aquafolia:

“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live. Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds. Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.”

—

What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness?, Jess Zimmerman (via xshayarsha)

(via thewitchwife)

coolhandofagirl:

stop me if you’ve heard this one but men will search for women who are full of joy and confidence so they can leech off of it and then after they’ve left her empty and burned out and drained of all the life that once existed behind her eyes they’ll say she isn’t the woman they fell in love with

(via lanternhearted)

(via awriterandnothingelse)

(via thesofthuman)

soracities:

“Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”

— Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories (via agooduniverse)

(via mumfordandsons-was-a-vibe)