Rhyarnith• Show poetry

What good is it to tell someone what you think of yourself? You see yourself in a light that, most likely, very few see you in as well. Either you are too full of yourself and need that ego popped, or see yourself as so low, it's impossible to have a realistic conversation because you believe in nothing anyway.
I like myself, I hate myself. I have good and bad parts of me, most of which you'll never even get to see.
I'm a person of many faces, many words, but keep so many to myself and use others' to better explain what I mean.
I regret some things, I miss some things. I hate the things I say, yet to lose even a word is killing myself. Be that as it may, make your own assumptions of me, my writing, or my beliefs, because I promise you, you understand very little of any of it.



To write a poem is not painful, and yet after hours are spent on it, polishing and retouching, there is a certain touch of despair mingled with our other feelings that indicates the lack of perfect, undoubted satisfaction, a certain self-reproach because the lines do not carry the entire beauty of the sentiment.
-The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Two, Anaïs Nin

"One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this."
-Cervantes, Don Quixote

"She had an animal sense that vulnerability is dangerous."
-"Suicide Blonde" Darcey Steinke

"After so many broken hearts, the really bloody kind - I've decided it's better to rely on memories. I sift mine, refine them, till they are like jewels in a black velvet bag."
-"Suicide Blonde" Darcey Steinke

"Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn."
-Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

"Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the oceans of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me and pinned it to the sky."
-Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

They will feel less alone because of you, they will feel understood, unburdened by you, awakened by you, freed of guilt and shame and sorrow. But to share with them you must wear shoes you must go out you must not hide you must dance and it will be harder you must face jealousy and sometimes rage and desire and love which can hurt most of all because of what can then be taken away. So make that astral dress to fit your own body this time.
-Francesca Lia Block

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
-Anais Nin

"If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always.I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.....
Night is the harvester of memories. Night is the gatherer of thoughts that hide in sunlight. Night brings out the inhabitants from the deep cracks that shun the idiotic noise of the masses. Night empowers and makes one bold. True love and the telling of secrets only happens at night. Sunlight is a passionless interrogator. Candlelight brings out the beauty of the human form."
-Henry Rollins, Black Coffee Blues

Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
-Hermann Hesse, "Steppenwolf"

The mirror cannot lie, and yet it does, it does! It cannot reflect the flame-like destinies trapped inside the frustrated soul.
-Michel Faber, "The Crimson Petal and the White"

Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me,
and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you.
Encourage me, and I will not forget you.
-William Arthur Ward

The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
-Franz Wright, from “Letter, January 1998″

She...would dance herself off her feet and laugh and joke...while at night she would cry and pray and find no peace of mind and frequently spend her time till morning wandering about her room sorrowfully wringing her hands or sitting, all pale and cold... Day would dawn and she would...go out and laugh and chatter.
-Ivan Turgenev "Fathers and Sons"

All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.
-Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

"There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind, you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave the piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe, I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than when you started."
-Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult

"She was beautiful, her beauty fell and terrible to look upon. Her face was cold as the vast, frozen wastelands to the south, where a man perishes in an instant, his breath turning to ice in his lungs. Her eyes were the flames of a funeral pyre. Her nails were talons, her hair long and ragged hair of the corpse. Her armor was black fire. At her side, she wore a sword perpetually stained with blood, a sword used to sever the souls from their bodies"
-Author Unknown

How much of love is a choice? How much of it is a mutual commitment? It was one thing for me to feel sorry for myself because I didn't feel sufficiently loved while growing up, but how many people had slipped through my life unpursued? Unloved?
-Robin Jones Gunn, Gardenias for Breakfast

"D'you know what happens when you hurt people?" Ammu said. "When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."
-The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

"We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructable tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place."
-The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

The house is full of bad dreams. They lurk in the curtians like ugly smells, they infest the carpets like the dust mites that may kill babies in their cots. Shake the curtians, beat the carpets: the dreams are tenacious, they cannot be dislodged. They hatch, they multiply.
-'The Worry Box' Marion Halligan

"She was cynical, sometimes, yes. She could be curt when she grew impatient with people, which was often. But she was romantic, always."
-The Dog Walker by Leslie Schnur

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.
-The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

"We ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that was not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny."
-Blindness by Jose Saramago

I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? . . . We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forest far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
"Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors" Kafka

Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark; it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even in the marrow of our bones, and we see it radiate even to the depths of the sky.
-Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

I opened myself to you only to be skinned alive. The more vulnerable I became, the faster and more deft your knife. Knowing what was happening, still I stayed and let you carve more. That's how much I loved you. That's how much.
-Rabih Alameddine: I, the Divine

"You can't change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking in the overview, you see the pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving."
-Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. LeGuin

I know this will sound glib,
but don't pretend you aren't feeling what you feel.
That's how things slide into hell.
Feelings are facts.
-The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

"Just one thing," she says, raising her head and looking me straight in the eye. "I want you to remember me. If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets."
-Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami