“What do you do from morning to night ?”
“I endure myself.“
– Emil M. Cioran, from “The Trouble with Being Born”, translated from the French by Richard Howard
More you might like
“Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.”
Anne Carson, from Plainwater
“I dread sleeping: my dreams appal me”
Emily Brontë, from Wuthering Heights
“Whatever had it meant to us, what will you mean to me, does nothing end?”
Frank O'Hara, from Poems Retrieved; “Noir Cacadou or the Fatal Music of War,”
“Have you forgotten me? I am the one you used to say you loved. I used to sleep in your arms – do you remember?”
— Dylan Thomas, from a letter to Caitlin Thomas wr. c. March 1950
“drunk on my own madness, I cried furiously, “Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!””
— Charles Baudelaire, from Light-Gathering Poems: from “The Bad Glazier”
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
(via the-book-diaries)
“You cast away the past, and forget it as though it had never been at all, as though it had been a dream, and begin to live anew.”
— Anton Chekhov, “In Exile,” in The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov
“It’s clear that I’m absolutely exiled from society and I’ve just confirmed that this isn’t a meaningless expression. I simply have nothing to say to them, we have nothing in common. But I’m the one who understands, I’m the one who knows. That is so hard to say. But I also don’t wish to talk. To anybody. I want to see clearly into myself.”
— Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) in a letter to her psychoanalyst, León Ostrov (likely sent between July and August 1961)
“Time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.”
— Tennessee Williams, from The Catastrophe Of Success (via violentwavesofemotion)