shiori

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”
― George Eliot

“I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow.
It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to “my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh, like barbs. If I can hold so much love within me, and nevertheless continue to be uneasy, it’s because I need God to come. Come, before it’s too late. I’m in danger, as is everyone who’s alive.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life