“I handpicked my softness like a flower arraignment. And you, with those strong hands: crushing all the petals you could get your fingers on.”
— IT’S ILLEGAL TO PICK WILDFLOWERS IN TEXAS, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
“I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?”
Ocean Vuong, On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals
“I have the tongue
of some endangered animal. No one can understand me / anymore.”
Tomye Blount, ‘The Tongue’
Mary Oliver, “From the Book of Time”
Maggie Stiefvater, “Blue Lily, Lily Blue”
Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar”
Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
“I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”
— Ada Limón, from “Mowing” in Bright Dead Things