You Storm Away Without A Backward Glance

Any quotes about night and stars, please? ✨

"The night is shaped like a howling wolf."

— Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness; from ‘Paths of the Mirror’, tr. Yvette Siegert

"Then, it being night, and the twin stars of Castor and Pollux just visible in the sky, I spoke of that tragedy, of two brothers whose love we might find unnatural, so stricken in grief when one was killed that the other, begging for his life again, accepted instead that for half the year one might live, and for the rest of the year the other, but never the two together. So it is for us, who while on earth in these suits of lead sense the presence of one we love, not far away but too far to touch."

— Jeanette Winterson, from 'Sexing the Cherry'

"The night is cold and delicate and full of angels"

— John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains; from ‘The Ecclesiast’

"Oh starry starry night! This is how / I want to die."

— Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones; from ‘The Starry Night’

"Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it’s more."

—Jeanette Winterson, from 'Why I adore the night'

"…a strange night-time otherworld of darkness and starlight and the fine line between life and death."

— Katherine Clements, from 'The Coffin Path'

"But the Orphics say that black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe, was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and that Eros, whom some call Phanes, was hatched from this egg and set the Universe in motion."

—Robert Graves, from 'The Greek Myths: The Complete and Definitive Edition'

"That doesn’t stop me having a tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion — so I go outside at night to paint the stars [...]"

— Vincent van Gogh

"Night. Such a beautiful word."

— Janet Fitch, from 'Chimes of a Lost Cathedral'

"Why shun darkness? / The night abounds with diamond drops."

— Forugh Farrokhzad, Asir (Captive); from 'On Loving', tr. Sholeh Wolpé

"Dear, though the night is gone, / Its dream still haunts to-day,"

— W. H. Auden, Selected Poems; from ‘Dear, though the night is gone’

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, "Consume me."

"I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams."

— Virginia Woolf, from 'The Waves'

"By day I am nothing, by night I am myself."

Fernando Pessoa, from 'The Book of Disquiet', tr. Margaret Jull Costa

"...the frozen glitter of stars, shattered glass on black silk..."

— Maggie O' Farrell, from 'Hamnet'

"I sometimes fancy that my body is made up of all the different stars. Leo’s in my chest; I’m sure it’s Leo because my heart roars."

— Jeanette Winterson, from 'Boating for Beginners'

"Night, the night again, the magisterial wisdom of the dark."

— Alejandra Pizarnik, A Musical Hell; from ‘Desire for the Word’, tr. Yvette Siegert

"If only at the midnight hour / You’d send me a greeting across the stars."

— Anna Akhmatova, Seventh Book; from Sweetbrier In Blossom; ‘In a Dream’, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer

"Under the shield of night, / let me unburden the moon."

— Forugh Farrokhzad, Reborn; from ‘Border Walls’, tr. Sholeh Wolpé

"The night snows stars and the earth creaks."

— Ted Hughes, Wodwo; from ‘The Howling of Wolves’

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from The Collected Poems 1924-1955; “And if the soul”

Tuesday, 20th July 2021

At night in quiet solitude of the passing day

I turn the yellowing pages of the waxing moon

Molten in a burning light to show its age

And cast in pooling stains of inky blue

It glows in flickers of a dying candle light

Wrapped in a purple wreath, delicately crowned

An encroaching darkness consuming the night

It dims its eyes to rest amongst the drowned

How about in 2024 we stop it with reading books with the goal in mind to finish the book so you can add it to your list of read books and start reading books slowly and intentionally with the goal to rip it into pieces with your mind and be touched by it and formed by it and changed by it

Some small things in this world that I like and am very grateful for #1

Ice

Slipper socks

Sun umbrellas

untitled

and one fine morning, i float away; drifting into that azure emptiness

I would love to see a collection of quotes about the moon/moongazing. Thanks

"We looked at the moon and the moon looked at us."

— Helen Oyeyemi, from ‘White Is for Witching’

"How bright, glaring-bright, the moon […] Shreds of cloud blowing across it like living things."

"A cold-glaring full moon suspended in the sky like the unblinking eye of God."

— Joyce Carol Oates, from ‘We Were the Mulvaneys’

"There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery."

— Joseph Conrad, from 'Lord Jim'

"As the moon’s shadow passes over you—like a rush of gloom, a tornado, a cannonball, a loping god, the heeling over of a boat, a slug of anaesthetic up your arm…"

— Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera; from ‘Totality: The Colour of Eclipse’

"Under the shield of night, / let me unburden the moon."

— Forugh Farrokhzad, Reborn; from ‘Border Walls’, tr. Sholeh Wolpé

"The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls."

— Sylvia Plath, Ariel; from 'The Moon and the Yew Tree'

"The brimming moon looked through me and I could not move."

— Ted Hughes, Recklings; from ‘Keats’

"The full moon is out, casting her equivocal corpse-glow over all."

— Margaret Atwood, from ‘The Testaments’

"I never go walking in the moonlight, never, without being met by thoughts of my dead, without the feeling of death and of the future coming over me."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ tr. David Constantine

"And the moon is wilder every minute."

— W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer; from 'Solomon and the Witch'

"A moon loosened from a stag’s eye,"

— Theodore Roethke, Praise to the End!; from ‘Give Way, Ye Gates’

"Moon full, moon dark,"

— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘Goatsucker’

"Let’s order one last round and kiss in front of god and the rest of the drunks, then pour ourselves out into the night, following the moon anywhere but home."

— William Taylor Jr., from ‘Literary Sexts: Volume 2′

"In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth, / meaningless but full of messages."

— Louise Glück, A Village Life; from ‘A Village Life’

"while from the moon, my lover’s eye / chills me to death"

— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems: Juvenilia; from ‘To a Jilted Lover’

"The moon has a strange look to-night. Has she not a strange look? She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers."

"Look at the moon! How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman."

"Oh! How strange the moon looks. You would think it was the hand of a dead woman who is seeking to cover herself with a shroud."

— Oscar Wilde, from 'Salomé'

"The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone. / She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag."

— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘Edge’

"Where, indeed does the moon not look well? What is the scene, confined or expansive, which her orb does not hallow?"

— Charlotte Brontë, from 'Villette'

"And the tarnished sliver of moon glows / Like an old serrated knife."

— Anna Akhmatova, Seventh Book: from ‘In a Broken Mirror’, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer

"In the full moon you dream more."

— Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House; from ‘The Ottawa River By Night’

"…the moon appeared momentarily […] her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud.

— Charlotte Brontë, from ‘Jane Eyre’

"It is not so much moonless as the moon is seen nowhere / And always felt."

— Dorothea Lasky, Black Life; from ‘Poets, You Are Eager’

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. / You leave the same impression / Of something beautiful, but annihilating."

— Sylvia Plath, Ariel; from ‘The Rival’

poetically aligned; beneath these opal sunken twilit skies.

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year