Joy Ladin, From “Forgetting“

“2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”

-Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Mikhail Kuzmin, from “The Summer’s Love,” featured in “A Treasury of Russian Verse,”

“With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.”

— Leo Tolstoy (1847-1910), Anna Karenina

“Soft and exquisite,”

— Li Qingzhao, tr. by Jiaosheng Wang, from “A Partridge Sky for the Cassia Flower.” (via violentwavesofemotion)

Seraphine Saintclair, “The Winglessness”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot

Gennady Aygi, tr. by Peter France, from “The People Are a Temple.”

“I bloom within myself, inwardly,”

— Gabriela Mistral, from Selected Prose & Prose Poems; “The Fig,”

Anna Akhmatova, from "Don't Frighten Me" in Selected Poems