Rumi, from “Unseen Rain; Quatrains of Rumi,” originally publ. c. 1986
Paris is always showing its teeth. When it is not snarling, it is laughing.
Les Misérables, Part III, Book I, Chapter XI (via sextmen)
“What is it like to be immortal?” Icarus asks.
“Think of it like this,” Apollo explains, ”when I was small, so was my world. The only sky I knew was the one at the foot of my father’s throne. But as I grew, so did my world. I soared the skies above Sparta and Athens and all I asked for became mine. To be immortal is to know that greater victories always await.”
Apollo rakes his eyes over Icarus’ beating wings, “What is it like to be mortal?”
Icarus says nothing as the gentle brush of Apollo’s fingertips leave burns along his jaw. He says nothing as his lungs fill with ash after every kiss. Nothing as his body begins to feel the weight of his wings pulling him down.
And finally, as the wings give in to the heat, and Icarus falls through the clouds, he closes his eyes and says with a smile,
“It feels like this.”
—If you have to ask, then it was never meant to be yours anyway. (i.s.)
I don’t know, my favorite was always witch weather. That moment that in a gust of wind or in the rumbling sky or at the edge of a fog bank where suddenly, you feel different. A restlessness, a sense of longing for a place that does not exist. I don’t know if anyone else has felt the electric tense changing of that moment. It calls the magic to your skin. For a moment, you feel ancient and powerful and lonely, as if you forgot something important. Witch weather. For some reason, in that wild instant: you remember you are alive, and that means some part of you belongs to the everlasting.
when Charles Bukowski said "and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?"