The collection / 60 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

60 results · Page 1 of 3Play this collection ▷

01c. 1962 AD

I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

02c. 1962 AD

What sexual preference do you hope she has?” “Happiness.” Isnt that cool?

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

03c. 1962 AD

My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

04c. 1962 AD

This was not a fearie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

05c. 1962 AD

Stories are like genies...They can carry us into and though our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.Our stories can set us free...When we set them free.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

06c. 1962 AD

You are so intense. Like a storm. It's shocking how intense you are.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

07c. 1962 AD

It was always a relief when she came home to him. Like water or food. Like music or that moment when you cut yourself with a knife and squeeze the skin and no blood oozes out.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

08c. 1962 AD

If death is your lover, you don't got to be afraid ever that he will ever leave you

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

09c. 1962 AD

Witch Baby wanted to ask Ping how to find her Jah-Love angel. She knew Raphael was not him, even though Raphael had the right eyes and smile and name. She knew how he looked--the angel in her dream--but she didn't know how to find him. Should she roller-skate through the streets in the evenings when the streetlights flicker on? Should she stow away to Jamaica on a cruise ship and search for him in the rain forests and along the beaches? Would he come to her? Was he waiting, dreaming of her in the same way she waited and dreamed?

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

10c. 1962 AD

They knew, though, she would not suffer as they had suffered. She was perfect. They were scarred.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

11c. 1962 AD

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

12c. 1962 AD

L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.'She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

13c. 1962 AD

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

14c. 1962 AD

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

15c. 1962 AD

Everyone whirled around her, entranced by the stories in which they recognized themselves, but in the stories they were also more than themselves and it always felt at the end fulfilled, not meaningless and empty like life can sometimes feel.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

16c. 1962 AD

I'll be inside the one who holds you. And then I won't be.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

17c. 1962 AD

Weetzie could see him--it was a man, a little man in a turban, with a jewel in his nose, harem pants, and curly-toed slippers. "Lanky Lizards!" Weetzie exclaimed."Greetings," said the man in an odd voice, a rich, dark purr."Oh, shit!" Weetzie said."I beg your pardon? Is that your wish?

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

18c. 1962 AD

If you want to find the trail, if you want to find yourself, you must explore your dreams alone. You must grow at a slow pace in a dark cocoon of loneliness so you can fly like wind, like wings, when you awaken.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

19c. 1962 AD

Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

20c. 1962 AD

I'd sit around dreaming that the boys I saw at shows or at work - the boys with silver earrings and big boots - would tell me I was beautiful, take me home and feed me Thai food or omelets and undress me and make love to me all night with the palm trees whispering windsongs about a tortured gleaming city and the moonlight like flame melting our candle bodies.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

21c. 1962 AD

for frail but surprisingly strong fairies who had lost their way above groundfor burned mermaids and sick vampire girlsfor wild wolfish women with sharp teeth and leaves in their hair

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

22c. 1962 AD

Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you’ve split yourself open. And when they see you, guts shining, brain pulsing, heart right there exposed in a rhythm that beats need need, need need, need need, pianos do not run. And so she plays.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

23c. 1962 AD

Maybe i would become a mermaid... i would live in the swirling blue-green currents, doing exotic underwater dances for the fish, kissed by sea anemones, caressed by seaweed shawls. I would have a doliphin friend. He would have merry eyes and thick flesh of a god. My fingernails would be tiny shells and my skin would be like jade with light shining through it I would never have to come back up

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗

24c. 1962 AD

You have to make your own family, your own life.

Francesca Lia Block / quote

↗