yagmr

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“She often told herself that story, easing herself into sleep, drifting off as she patched together the ghostly memory of someone in whose real existence she hardly believed any more.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“I realized I'd always believed what other people said about me. What he'd said about me. We remember everything other people say about us, I think. Wear a skin made of all those words, so that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, that's what we see. I was starting to pick that skin away, and I was happy. I liked what I found underneath.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl