vaishnavi

“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“That music could have crumbled proud belief
With doubt, or in the bosom of the sage
Madden the heart that had outmastered grief,
And flood with tears the eyes of frozen age
And turn the young man's feet to pilgrimage -
So sharp it was, so sure a path it found,
Soulward with stabbing wounds of bitter sound.
- Dymer, Canto I, v. 24”
― Clive Hamilton / CS Lewis