t.

“ The Wedding Ring

Although the lamp was out, above its darkness
I saw the bright reflection of a flame.
My soul is bare, stripped to the purest bareness;
It has escaped, transcended all its bounds.

A man, I held desire my dearest treasure.
but I give it, myself, my sacred pain,
my prayers, my ecstasies - all these, O Father,
I give with love to You, most loving one.

And so the hour of limitless surrender
enclosed me in a cloak of flames like wings;
empowered me with the power of Your commandment,
and clothed me in Your holy veil of fire.

So let me stretch my hand out to my brother;
I look in the Face of You, the Fount of Life,
and in the radiance of transfigured torture
I bear my cross, light as a wedding ring.”
― Zinaida Gippius

“By the moon, I suddenly realized how much I was tied to this beautiful and damned universe.”
― E M Cioran, Notebook from Talamanca

“We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence...To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Perhaps one suffers in the tomb. There are corpses that have strange grimaces on their faces when they’re disinterred, as if they remember down there all the filth of this life.”
― Jean Lorrain, The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies