Persian, Dilorom Told Me, Had Only One Word For Crying, Whereas Old Uzbek Had One Hundred. Old Uzbek

“Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound ‘hay hay.’”

— Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Odysseus Elytis, from The Axion Esti

Text ID: "Within your body [...] / ancient remnants of love,"

lotfilotfi (Instagram)

Read Blindness by Jorge Luis Borges in its entirety here, 

& here’s a free link to his Collected Fictions, too. 

We read Sappho at school, in classes intended merely to teach poetic metre. Very few of our teachers imagined that they were swelling our veins with cassia and myrrh. In dry voices they went on about aorist tense, while inside ourselves we felt the leaves of trees shivering in the light, everything dappled, everything trembling.

We were so young then we had never met. In back gardens we read as much as we could, staining our dresses with mud and pine-pitch. [...] Each one lingered in her own place, searching the fragments of poems for words to say what it was, this feeling that Sappho calls aithussomenon, the way that leaves move when nothing touches them but the afternoon light.

—Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho

“Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (via ginsengsheetmask)