Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

“Some mornings I’m filled with longing, with sadness that has no cause.”

— Lisa Olstein, from “[both the specific remedy and the condition of health]” in The Lost Alphabet (via postmoderniste)

love as a religion

jacob from the bible, jake wesley rogers / red, white, & royal blue by casey mcquiston / religion (u can lay your hands on me), shura / soul like thunder by sophia elaine hanson / psyche revived by cupid’s kiss, antonio canova / don’t blame me, taylor swift / lovin’ is bible, the aces / from eden, hozier / coming down, halsey / heaven is a place on earth, belinda carlisle / colors, halsey / bedroom hymns, florence + the machine / 02x04 fleabag / sanctuary, aly & aj / genesis, dua lipa / like a prayer, madonna / young god, halsey / pussy is god, king princess / church, fall out boy / the raven king by maggie stiefvater

“[One day] […] there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead–when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”

— Irvin D. Yalom, from Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1989)

Jane Hirshfield, Assay Only Glimpsable for an Instant

soliloquy of the solipsist, sylvia plath

sleepy girls club™

Something Wicked / “Innocence”, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Louise Glück

“I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something.”

— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

“My realities may be different from what most people call reality, but still they are realities.”

— Etty Hillesum (1914-1943), in a letter to Osias Kormann, from a Westerbork concentration camp, 1943, in “An Interrupted Life: Diaries and Letters 1941-43. And Letters from Westerbork″