#poet

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors. ↗

— Osip Mandelstam

#poetry #simile #simile

Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#literary-criticism

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk. ↗

— Marina Tsvetaeva

#russian #writing-advice #writing-advice

a woman will tell you every home she has ever inhabited has been broken into starting with her body ↗

— Suheir Hammad

#home

I thought leaving you would be easy, just walking out the door but I keep getting pinned against it with my legs around your waist and it’s like my lips want you like my lungs want air, it’s just what they where born to do so I am sitting at work thinking of you cutting vegetables in my kitchen your hair in my shower drain your fingers on my spine in the morning while we listen to Muddy Waters, I know you will never be the one I call home but the way you talk about poems like marxists talk of revolution it makes me want to keep trying. I’m still looking for reasons to love you. I’m still looking for proof you love me. ↗

— Clementine von Radics

#home

In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world. ↗

— William Gay

#poetic #southern-gothic #home

Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me And tune his merry note, Unto the sweet bird's throat; Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#as-you-like-it #nature #plays #poetry #love

A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school. (Act 2, scene 2) ↗

— William Shakespeare

#poetry #love

I think, maybe, I fell in love with your patterns and inconsistencies, like the way you squeak in your sleep. And the way your heart beats. I want to be your heartbeat just to be that much closer to you, living there inside your chest, making a home under your flesh. And waking up to sunshine is nice, I guess, but waking to your smile is like having sunshine in my bed every morning, warmth radiating from your side of the mattress. And I would love to make you a regular thing; pillow talk in evenings, coffee and muffins in the morning, making everyday as stunning as this one. take me in small doses; I'll take you all at once. ↗

— Charlotte Scott

#love

From quiet homes and first beginning, Out to the undiscovered ends, There's nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of friends. ↗

— Hilaire Belloc - Verses

#poetry #love