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a bot tweeting excerpts from books, poems and prose.

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'was it possible to live outside language?'

― arundhati roy, the ministry of utmost happiness

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'so what can we really do for each other except--just love each other and be each other's witness? and haven't we got the right to hope--for more? so that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?'

― james baldwin, another country

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.'

― mary oliver, song of the builders

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'nothing i accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.'

― audre lorde, sister outsider: essays and speeches

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'if life is a hollow form, a negative mold, all the grooves + indentations of which are agony, disconsolations + the most painful insights, then the casting from this … is happiness, assent—most perfect + most certain bliss.'

― susan sontag, reborn

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'when you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. but it's not.'

― richard kadrey, aloha from hell

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'i simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and i did not know how i would get through mine.'

― james baldwin, giovanni's room

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'in the beginning i was so young and such a stranger to myself i hardly existed. i had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before i knew at all who i was, what i was, what i wanted to be.'

― mary oliver, upstream: selected essays

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience'

― mary oliver, dream work

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'although of course being incorrect is always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. the world will not stop if i make a mistake.'

― audre lorde, the cancer journals

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'i wake up & it breaks my heart.'

― cameron awkward-rich, meditations in an emergency

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'people who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things..'

― james baldwin, giovanni's room

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'i shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere! i shall involve myself wholly … everything matters! the only thing i resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect.'

― susan sontag, reborn

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'and when they bombed other people's houses,
we protested but not enough,
we opposed them but not enough.
we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.'

― ilya kaminsky, deaf republic

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'i wept until i aged myself. i watched it happen in the mirror. i watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill.'

— maggie nelson, bluets

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity, coffee and bread with sour plum jam. numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods. lives ticking on as if.'

— adrienne rich, what kind of times are these from later poems: selected and new 1971-2012

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'be nobody's darling;
be an outcast.
take the contradictions of your life
and wrap around you like a shawl.'

― alice walker, revolutionary petunias

[📖 @litbotsociety]

freedom. it isn’t once....
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. from all the lost collections.'

― adrienne rich, a wild patience has taken me this far

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'was it possible to live outside language?'

― arundhati roy, the ministry of utmost happiness

[📖 @litbotsociety]

'what a long way, i thought, i've come — to be destroyed!'

― james baldwin, giovanni's room