aurora > aurora's Quotes

“I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“We will not drink from the same cup -
Neither water nor sweet wine is ours,
We will not kiss as the sun goes up
Or gaze at the night, on the sill, for hours.
I breathe by the moon, you – by the sun”
― Anna Akhmatova

“I've grown lean from eating only the past.”
― Jenny Xie, Eye Level: Poems

“To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“Every story is us”
― Jalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“You’ve so distracted me, your absence fans my love. Don’t ask how. Then you come near. “Do not…” I say, and “Do not…,” you answer. Don’t ask why this delights me.”
― Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don't honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that's what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don't see feel/think as a dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Sandalwood"


The ash keeps dropping from the incense stick.

I keep turning you over in my mind.
I keep turning you over in my heart.

The stick shortens, burning.
The ash grows
and falls.

I keep turning you over.
I keep turning you.
I keep turning.

The ash keeps falling, piling up, more
of the silent reduction.

Burning earns such clean wages,
eye of ember, eye of ash hastening.

I keep turning your eyes over
to find your thoughts.
Turning your voice over
to find your meaning.
Turning your body over to find
a place to hide me.

And you keep turning inside me.”
― Li-Young Lee, The Undressing: Poems

“Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life's history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body. An accounting of his body's failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he's been made and planted.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life