Symptoms of Madness

Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

—Nikki Giovanni (via thefagartist)

(Source: amandaonwriting, via vanswearingen)

The ninth month into your fourteenth year
your breasts began to grow around the
initialled gold necklace that
your uncle had bought you for your
seventh birthday.
your body could be divided into handfuls
you wrote in your diary a lot about how
you felt like you were going to explode.
there were nights when womanhood left you feverish
you ached across a childish bed like a shameful secret
as though all the blood leaving your body would kill you soon
and no, you didn’t have an older sister to speak to and
your mother was busy being strong.
it was that same year when you began to count
the stretch marks on your hips
like they were a tally of surviving
when you began to measure your thighs
with two open palms, when you learnt how to
throw up at night, begging the body back to innocent.
your lips became two halves of something
you couldn’t open
no one warned you about how girls voices also change
there was nothing to prepare you for it
how some words would feel dirty in your mouth
how you would shy away from calling your father
‘daddy’.

—Warsan Shire (via princessbindi)

(Source: rabbitinthemoon, via justfallamongtheclouds)

You like him because he’s a lost boy. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.

—David Levithan, Every Day  (via weaverofstars)

(Source: durianquotes, via vanswearingen)

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

—Don DeLillo, White Noise (via larmoyante)

(via seventeentimesinfinity)