Dostoevskyswife - Stars, Hide Your Fires.

“You may think: What’s happened? Good God, are they kidding? But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.”

— Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

Anaïs Nin, from a novel titled "A Spy in the House of Love," published in 1954

“Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

"ماذا تطوي في قلبك حتى فاض على سيماك؟"

-صلاح عبد الصبور

Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Oh, Canada (2024)

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Edward Sackville-West written c. September 1926

Dostoevsky is one of those writers who, after showing you your fragmental vileness and natural disfigurement, teach you why you need to learn to love yourself.

read classic poetry in the bath.  scratch shakespeare quotes into your desk.  keep black-and-white pictures in a golden locket.  learn the language you’ve always wanted to learn.  dance in the rain, even if you’re not sure how.  read wikipedia pages on unsolved mysteries at two in the morning.  live your life the way you want to, make your own rules, become who you’ve dreamed of being.  because really, who’s stopping you?

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights