memoryslandscape:

“Oh, how often you’ll remember The sudden pain of unnamed longing”

— Anna Akhmatova, from “I’ll erase this day from your memory,” trans. A. S. Kline, White Flock (Hyperborea, 1917)

violentwavesofemotion:

“Do you know what torture by hope is? After despair, calm sets in, but hope can drive you mad.”

— Anna Akhmatova, quoted by Lydia Chukovskaya in the “The Akhmatova Journals,”

lifeinpoetry:

Wild honey has a scent—of freedom

Dust—a scent of sunshine

And a girl’s mouth—of violets.

But gold—nothing.

Water—like mignonette.

And like apple—love.

But we have learned that

Blood smells only of blood.

— Anna Akhmatova, from “Wild Honey Is a Smell of Freedom,” published in Indiana Review tr. Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky

(Source: indianareview.org)

autumnalsonata:

“Human voices did not touch me, / it was the wind whose words I heard.”

— Anna Akhmatova, from Poems of Akhmatova: “Willow”

violentwavesofemotion:

I don’t speak with anyone for a week. I just sit on a stone by the sea.

Anna Akhmatova, from Plantain

… and there is something about the achingly bright expanse of blue that makes me feel infinitely placid, infinitely calm, infinitely spacious. Something there is about the ceaseless, unperturbed ebb and flow … about the vast masses of green-blue water … that heals all my uneasy questionings and self-searchings.

Sylvia Plath, from a letter

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing, emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace of the deepest sea, which is easier than the noise and flesh of the surface.

Margaret Atwood, from Eurydice

The sea has many voices, Many Gods and many voices.

T.S. Eliot, from The Dry Salvages

Look there: how she approaches impatiently over the sea. Do you not feel the thirst and the hot breath of her love? She would suck at the sea and drink its depth into her heights; and the sea’s desire rises toward her with a thousand breasts. It wants to be kissed and sucked by the thirst of the sun; it wants to become air and height and a footpath of light, and itself light.

Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The sea is working, working in my silence.

Pablo Neruda, from Nothing More

She knows what she wants: she wants to remain standing still in the sea. And so she remains. The woman neither receives nor transmits. She does not need to communicate. She knows that she is gleaming from the water, the salt and the sun. In some obscure way her dripping hair is like that of a shipwrecked person.

Clarice Lispector, from An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Delights

I wish you a kinder sea.

Emily Dickinson, from a letter

honeyfleshed:

“I see everything. I remember it all. Gently, lovingly, I preserve it in my heart.”

– Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems

artsnquotes:

““I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again.”

— Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

(Source: artsnquotes.com)

notesoutofmymind:

(via parallel-monologues)

uptional:

“Literature is humanity talking to itself.”

— Norman Rush (via coral)

wholeheartedsuggestions:

i imagine us sitting on a beach someday wearing oversized hoodies and sitting close enough that our elbows touch. it’s cold and a little dark but the sounds of your breathing and the waves crashing against the shore are so calming. we watch the sun come up. we see the world in new color as morning begins. i want that.

(via sthoa)

aidashakur:

don’t carry that hurt into 2019 or it’s going be another toxic year.

(via sthoa)

sthoa:

“I loved you silently, without hope, fully, In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain; I loved you so tenderly and truly.”

— Alexander Pushkin
(via wordsnquotes)