Misguided Ghosts

antigonies:

“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things 

(via doveletter)

andeverythingisshattering:

ok i know we all go cuckoo crazy bananas for tender yearning pining whatever but i was just actually thinking about the roots of the word tender and how a —tender is someone who tends and that “tender” is not just concern and sympathy but also caring for and looking after and nourishing and tending which is a very gentle and beautiful thing and it’s all very “don’t you think they are maybe the same thing? love and attention?” and “i love you. i want us both to eat well.”

(via smoke-stungeyes)

boykeats:

                 It’s going to rain soon,
close clouds bloated above us,
the air like a net about to release
all the caught fishes, a storm
siren in the distance. I know
you don’t always understand,
but let me point to the first
wet drops landing on the stones,
the noise like fingers drumming
the skin. I can’t help it. I will
never get over making everything
such a big deal.

—Ada Limón, from “The Last Thing,” The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018)