#ai

I don't know why I feel so wounded with Kartik's obvious infatuation with Pippa. There's no romance between us. There's nothing that tethers us but this dark secret neither of us wants. It's not Kartik's longing that hurts. It's my own. It's knowing that I'll never have what she has--a beauty so powerful it brings things to you. I fear I will always have to chase things I want. I'll always have to wonder whether I'm truly wanted or whether I've just been settled for. ↗

— Libba Bray

#hurt #lost-love #love #pain #beauty

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#pain #beauty

Packy watched her walk away, her perfect heart-shaped rear end testing the confines of her tight black dress. There was a God. Packy was now certain of it. How else could such heart-stopping beauty be accounted for? Such a thing could not be the product of a random universe. A flower, maybe. A rainbow, perhaps. But not Venus Versailles. ↗

— Quentin R. Bufogle

#flamingo #las-vegas #venus-versailles #wish-you-were-here #beauty

Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever! ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#life #pain #sadness #beauty

No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad. ↗

— Michala Wrong

#dictator #history #mobutu-sese-seko #zaire #home

There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you. When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing. ↗

— Peter Heller

#grief #pain #pets #beauty

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#charles-baudelaire #the-flowers-of-evil #beauty

If we can write or sing or create in some way, even when we are dealing with difficulties or pain, then it becomes something bigger than ourselves — and often beautiful. ↗

— Brenda Peterson

#create #inspiration #music #pain #writing

I did want adventure. I didn’t want to prescribe Ritalin to ADHD kids and tell fat old men to get more exercise. I wanted to go to the heart of Africa. Cradling villages of starving, disease-ridden children. Reserving no luxuries for myself. We would share everything: “Here. This syringe is dirty. Careful.” Engaging the deadliest disease of all. The AIDS virus. The beauty of it’s DNA sequence, to be so extraordinarily complex without sacrificing elegance. The mystery. The danger. The romance as it waltzes with my white blood cells inside me. “Give it to me. Inject it,” I’d say. To be destroyed so efficiently. But I settled for less. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#funny #medicine #beauty

Long hair will make thee look dreafully to thine enemies, and manly to thy friends: it is, in peace, an ornament; in war, a strong helmet; it... deadens the leaden thump of a bullet: in winter, it is a warm nightcap; in summer, a cooling fan of feathers. ↗

— Thomas Dekker

#hair #humor #beauty