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“This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: 'Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I will greet the sun again,
greet the stream that once flowed in me,
the clouds that were my unfurling thoughts,
the aching growth of the grove’s poplars
who passed with me through seasons of draught.
I will greet the flock of crows
who gifted me the groves’ night perfume
and my mother who lived in the mirror
and was my old age’s reflection.
Once more I will greet the earth
who, in her lust to re-create me, swells
her flaming belly with green seeds.

I will come. I will come. I will.
My hair trailing deep-soil scents.
My eyes intimating the dark’s density.
I will come with a bouquet picked
from shrubs on the other side of the wall.
I will come, I will come. I will.
The doorway will glow with love
and I will once again greet those in love, greet
the girl standing in the threshold’s blaze.”
― Forugh Farrokhzad

“Remember its flight, for the bird is mortal. —Forugh Farrokhzad, Iranian poet (1935–1967)”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the streets alone- often at night, beside, I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes back to me. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say so, and I will strike the strings to one more strain of happiness before I die.”
― Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson