Margaret Atwood, From A Poem Titled "Eurydice," Featured In Paper Boat: Selected Poems

[She] looked as if she had been carved out of a single pearl.

Angela Carter, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.

"- being mental is complex / as hell. How do you keep track of your poems? Any- / one remembers what they like, but you have constantly / to emit them ..." -The Anthology by Alice Notley

Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student

London, 1949. source

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922; “A Hero of Labor”

﹙ Text ID: I’ll cry about this earth in heaven too.﹚

Obelisk and Metronome / Stanley Kunitz, from "The Testing-Tree"

I do not know the name of the feeling that I have for you. But it is a special tenderness, something I have never felt until now, not for anyone.

— Gustave Flaubert in correspondence with George Sand; Croisset, 12 November 1866, Monday night, from Selected Letters

he was saying we are in uncharted territory w AI and i said ya bc no one resisted it and he said well maybe there is no time and i said there is no time bc no one resisted. and i asked, do you know the rosenbergs? he said, yes they were executed, and i read him this excerpt from their last letter to their children: "Your lives must teach you, too, that good cannot flourish in the midst of evil; that freedom and all the things that go to make up a truly satisfying and worthwhile life, must sometime be purchased very dearly. Be comforted then that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding, that civilization had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life; and that we were comforted in the sure knowledge that others would carry on after us." and i said that is what i mean, human civilization cannot progress when there has been so much oppression and not enough resistance and maybe we accept AI simply bc we are dumb. maybe humans are simply dumb and there is nothing more to it. but what about my capacity for reflection? AI has none, he agreed. what about my capacity to metabolize the external through the lens of my past experiences which, in turn, produces perspective? what abt all the labour that went into my loving you? what abt those sleepless nights? what abt the depths of my soul?

idk who will read this and idc. at least it is for no one or someone and not chatgpt. at least it's not spat out back at me. at least i'm revisiting a younger version of myself on tumblr as a grown woman. and then i remembered my ex best friend who thought she is not stupid bc she accepted the world is ending but we will hv so much fun together, at least. we will play and travel and laugh. and why pretend everything is fine, but on the other hand, why be sad about it? anyways. alice notley laughed at the question that poets sublimate. she said poets suffer and they write about how they perceive things after suffering. she said, i have never sublimated. in the office today i looked outside and my eyes welled w tears to see all my accomplishments manifest after so much pain. i felt all this gratitude, this is what i dreamed of - it's happening, it's rly happening. and then you said let's go out and look at the cherry blossoms and i said ok. the world is ending and i still suffer deeply and i still love deeply and what a beauteous thing.

I like my body when it’s with your body

Clarice Lispector, from An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures (trans. Stefan Tobler) [ID'd]