LLORONA

“What to read?” is a recurring dilemma in my life.
The question always conjures up an image: a woman at home,
half-dressed, moving restlessly from room to room, picking
up a book, reading a page or two and no sooner feeling her
mind drift, telling herself, “You should be reading something
else, you should be doing something else.” The image also has
a mise-en-scène: overstuffed, disorderly shelves of dusty and
yellowing books, many of them unread; books in piles around
the bed or faced down on a table; work prints of photographs,
also with a faint covering of dust, taped to the walls of the studio;
a pile of bills; a sink full of dishes. She is trying to concentrate
on the page in front of her but a distracting blip in her
head travels from one desultory scene to the next, each one
competing for her attention. It is not just a question of which
book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but
rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her,
redeem her. Often what is at stake, should she want to spell it
out, is the idea that something is missing, as in: what is the
crucial bit of urgently needed knowledge that will save her, at
least for this day? She has the idea that if she can simply plug
into the right book then all will be calm, still, and right with
the world. — Moyra Davey, The Problem of Reading  (via tweepoppy)

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through. — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

(via sylviaplathquotes)

(via neoyorzapoteca)

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I discovered that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable, and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. — Joan Didion (via aquaphorwhor)

(via neoyorzapoteca)