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Margaret Atwood being super relatable as always!

Sophie, the girl, is given a spell and transformed into an old woman. It would be a lie to say that turning young again would mean living happily ever after. I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to make it seem like turning old was such a bad thing — the idea was that maybe she’ll have learned something by being old for a while, and, when she is actually old, make a better grandma. Anyway, as Sophie gets older, she gets more pep. And she says what’s on her mind. She is transformed from a shy, mousy little girl to a blunt, honest woman. It’s not a motif you see often, and, especially with an old woman taking up the whole screen, it’s a big theatrical risk. But it’s a delusion that being young means you’re happy.
— Hayao Miyazaki, on what attracted him to Howl’s Moving Castle
The Auteur of Anime by Margaret Talbot: “The New Yorker” (January 17th, 2005)

The Beautiful is always strange…it always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness, and it is that touch of strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty.
— Charles Baudelaire

I want you
as I want water, rain crocheting moss
from mist, sulfur on the pines’ crooked limbs,
hapless as the selkie who hums to herself—
— Cynthia Zarin, from “Meltwater,” Orbit: Poems

….for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learn’d the language of another world.
— Lord Byron, from “Manfred”

You who demolish me, you whom I love,
be near me. Remain near me when evening,
drunk on the blood of skies,
becomes night, in the other
a sword sheathed in the diamond of stars.

Be near me when night laments or sings,
or when it begins to dance,
its stell-blue anklets ringing with grief.
— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, tr. Agha Shahid Ali

A troop of horse, the serried ranks of marchers,
A noble fleet, some think these of all on earth
Most beautiful. For me naught else regarding
Is my beloved.

---

So must we learn in world made as this one
Man can never attain his greatest desire,
But must pray for what good fortune Fate holdeth,
Never unmindful.

---
If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho was the first bit of poetry to ever resonate with me and provoke a real emotional response, even of some of it does happen to be lost in the translation.

"So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

—Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
— Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, 1926

Night :
an oratory of dark,
a chapel of unreason.
— Eavan Boland, from “Solitary,” New Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2005)

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
— Franz Kafka

Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more
than of earth,
The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a
sea-covered stone
Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the
memories of the whole of my mirth,
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me
full to the bone.
— W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin: Book I

"I was having trouble sleeping. I don’t know how long I’d been lying there and listening to the blizzard when I had the most vivid impression that it was a blizzard in Minneapolis in 1959. And I found this deeply disturbing. I knew it would now have to turn on its lamp, get out of bed, and try to write about me; and of course no matter what it wrote, I would only sound like something it had made up. But in the end it decided to stay put, turn over, and keep me to itself. I think that was the right thing to do. After all, it was only a blizzard in Minneapolis in 1959. How are you supposed to describe something like me? And when you think about it, why should you try, why should you even care?"

-Franz Wright: Wintersleep

I want to leave
no one behind.

To keep
& be kept.

The way a field turns
its secrets

into peonies.

The way light
keeps its shadow

by swallowing it.

— Ocean Vuong, from “Into the Breach,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds

"Heart disease kills millions - what the **** are the edl going to do? Firebomb Greggs?"

My mate Dave haha

Corpse A
They brought her in, a shattered small
Cocoon,
With a little bruised body like
A startled moon;
And all the subtle symphonies of her
A twilight rune.
— from Suicide, Djuna Barnes


Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληίαδες· μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὤρα·
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.
-
The moon has sunk
and the Pleiades; it is
midnight, and time moves on,
but I lie down alone…
— Sappho (Cox 48)


This sky is unmistakable. Not lurid, not low, not black.
Illuminated and bruise-color, limitless, to the noon
Full of its floods to come. Under it, field, wheels, and mountain,
The valley scattered with friends, gathering in
Live-colored harvest, filling their arms; not seeming to hope
Not seeming to dread, doing.
I stand where I can see
Holding a small pitcher, coming in toward
The doers and the day.
These images are all
Themselves emerging: they face their moment, love or go down,
A blade of the strong hay stands like light before me.
The sky is a torment on our eyes, the sky
Will not wait for this golden, it will not wait for form.
There is hardly a moment to stand before the storm.
There is hardly time to lay hand to the great earth.
Or time to tell again what power shines past storm.
— Haying before storm, Muriel Mukeyser


(VI)
Against the black
I have more fervour
than you in all the splendour of that place,
against the blackness
and the stark grey
I have more light;
and the flowers,
if I should tell you,
you would turn from your own fit paths
toward hell,
turn again and glance back
and I would sink into a place
even more terrible than this.
(VII)
At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;
and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;
before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.
— H.D., Eurydice