Hayley Brown

“She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of the horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it!”
― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume X: The Man Who Lost the Sea

“Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

- Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus