Tag: back

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

– Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient

when the weight deadens

on your shoulders and you stumble,

the clay dance to balance you

the nourishment of the earth,

the clarity of light,

the fluency of the ocean,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

– John O’Donohue – Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

– Vladimir Nabokov –