Every once in a while, a page starts to circulate on your newsfeed and you know that for the next few months (at least), you’ll be hooked.
Although Berlin-Artparasites has been around for a few years, it seems like it has only caught Arab eyes in the last few months, and we know just why.
We don’t know how they do it, but whatever you’re going through, whatever battle you’re fighting or whatever thought is taking over your mind, you’ll find Berlin-Artparasites translating those mixed, confused feelings into words and hitting just the right nerve.
One of their posts mentioned that books tend to find us when we need to read them and I honestly think that’s exactly what their posts do. They address the issue you’re facing and tell you exactly what you need to hear. Whether it’s just the feeling that someone else out there understands exactly what you’re going through or the hard truth that no one around you wanted to voice, their posts dig deep and speak right to the heart.
Berlin-Artparasites initially started to showcase the work of artists in Berlin, but combining art with quotes that make you look at them both in a completely new way was just pure genius.
Choosing favourites wasn’t easy, especially with every single post putting our exact thoughts into words, but we tried!
Love
“Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.
I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.” ― Caitlyn Siehl, Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems
“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman
“My love has abandonment issues.
My love hates sleeping alone.
My love, a clenched fist around your
heart; yes, my love is that terrifying
because it doesn’t know release.
Imagine the moon, how she sets the ocean
free to spill over distant shorelines only to
clutch it back to her chest again and again.
We call this ‘tide’.
We call it ‘gravitational pull’.
My love is like that —
desperate, unapologetic.
Except they don’t write scientific theories
around my love; this swelling in my chest
is too big to be understood.
Big enough to have its own gravity
and some nights, even strong enough
to pull you back into my arms.”
— Anita Ofokansi
“You don’t get it. I barely understood it. I crave the kind of partner that will tell me when I’m wrong. Someone who will take the time to say to me, ‘This is going to be a sucky conversation because it’s going to be uncomfortable but if I don’t tell you, I can’t be certain anyone will and I want you to grow continuously into a superb human being.’ Do you get it? Don’t you want someone who wants you to keep growing?” — Mya Wright
Acceptance
“I am slowly learning that some people are not good for me, no matter how much I love them. I deserve someone who is gentle and kind, because my soul is getting tired. Realizing that I deserve something good is one of the first steps.” —Michelle K., Why I Need To Say Goodbye To You
“Accept the fact that you will grow apart from people you’ve had significant relationships with. Understand when someone no longer positively affects your life. Let them go. Don’t hinder your growth.” — lyjerria
“Stop minimizing and discounting your feelings. You have every right to feel the way you do. Your feelings may not always be logical, but they are always valid. Because if you feel something, then you feel it and it’s real to you. It’s not something you can ignore or wish away. It’s there, gnawing at you, tugging at your core, and in order to find peace, you have to give yourself permission to feel whatever it is you feel. You have to let go of what you’ve been told you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ feel. You have to drown out the voices of people who try to shame you into silence. You have to listen to the sound of your own breathing and honor the truth inside you. Because despite what you may believe, you don’t need anyone’s validation or approval to feel what you feel. Your feelings are inherently right and true. They’re important and they matter — you matter — and it is more than okay to feel what you feel. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, convince you otherwise.“ — Daniell Koepke
Pain
“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” — Jim Morrison
“You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.” ― Elizabeth Taylor
“All these poems about people leaving and not one about how I convinced myself to stay.
I know what you want to hear — that I slayed the dragon and swallowed my demons and laughed in the face of my nightmares and lived happily ever after — but the truth is much more ordinary.The truth is I breathe through the pain even on the days it whistles between my ribs on every inhale and every exhale and I celebrate like hell on the days it doesn’t make a sound.” — Fortesa Latifi, the d word is the elephant in the room
Reality
“After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises…After a while you learn…
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth…
And you learn and learn…
With every good-bye you learn.”— Veronica A. Shoffstall
“Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.” — Sarah Kay
“Not everything is supposed to become something beautiful and long-lasting. Sometimes people come into your life to show you what is right and what is wrong, to show you who you can be, to teach you to love yourself, to make you feel better for a little while, or to just be someone to walk with at night and spill your life to. Not everyone is going to stay forever, and we still have to keep on going and thank them for what they’ve given us.” — Emery Allen
“Before you even notice, you will have settled. You will enjoy your Monday morning coffee and think it’s just what you needed to start your day. You will visit the library every Tuesday, hoping to find some new escape in a new book, just to get away from your life. You will eat lunch with your best friend every Wednesday, order the usual at your favorite restaurant, you’re satisfied. On Thursday you go for a walk around your neighborhood to clear your mind, and look forward to tomorrow. On Friday evening you think you’ve made it, so you reward yourself with delivery pizza and an alright movie you’ve seen more than six times. Saturday, there’s still a day separating you from Monday, so you’re fine. Sunday, you dread, dread, until you go to bed. Then it’s the same old routine, slowly getting through life, thinking you enjoy it, when you could easily learn to enjoy something else. How do you know what you need to get through the day is just coffee? Maybe it’s just telling yourself, hey, I can do it, there’s more to look forward to. Instead of living your life through books why don’t you go on an adventure and take a risk like your favorite fictional character? How do you know that meal is really your favorite thing at a restaurant when you’ve never let yourself taste something else? Is looking forward to the end of the week your motivation to actually get through life? If it is, why, when you’re just living the same old shit week to week, nothing will change. You won’t change. You think you’re happy, but couldn’t you be happier?” — Isabel Cabrera, don’t settle
Loneliness
“So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there’s a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.” — Diana Ackerman
Forgiveness
“There are flowers
in this world
that only grow
after the ground
above them burns.Scientists say
that the fire sets
the earth aflame
with the birth of these
special flowers which
wouldn’t grow otherwise,
that even though the fire
seems to destroy
everything it touches,
it can also bring
new colors into this world.What I am trying to say
is that healing hurts,
but so does forgiveness,
and sometimes it is worth it
to see yourself bloom”
— Pavana पवन
“I forgive people but that doesn’t mean I accept their behavior or trust them. I forgive them for me, so I can let go and move on with my life.” — Meg Jarvis
Fear
“It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the sound I heard when I was 9 and my father slammed the front door so hard behind him I swear to god it shook the whole house. For the next 3 years I watched my mother break her teeth on vodka bottles. I think she stopped breathing when he left. I think part of her died. I think he took her heart with him when he walked out. Her chest is empty, just a shattered mess or cracked ribs and depression pills.
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s all the blood in the sink. It’s the night that I spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if my sister was going to be okay, after the boy she loved, told her he didn’t love her anymore. It’s the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood. So much blood.
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the time that I had to stay up for two days straight with my best friend while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her boyfriend fucked his ex. I swear to god she still has tear streaks stained onto her cheeks. I think when you love someone, it never really goes away.
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the six weeks we had a substitute in English because our teacher was getting divorced and couldn’t handle getting out of bed. When she came back she was smiling. But her hands shook so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. And sometimes when things break, you can’t fix them. Nothing ever goes back to how it was. I got an A in English that year. I think her head was always spinning too hard to read any essays.
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s that I do.” — @extrasad
“That’s what really scares me.
Falling in love is easy. Having sex is easier. But bumping into someone that can spark your soul – that shit is rare.You could fuck four, five, all the people in a god damned room and you’d only feel a connection with one. Or none at all.
And what sucks is despite the undeniable real magnetic pull between the two of you, more often than not, you don’t end up together.
I’m afraid I won’t meet anyone else I can connect with.
I’m scared it’ll be just you.”
— Connection, Sade Andria Zabala
“She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘Why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you.’” — Khaled Hosseini
“There’s only one thing worse than wanting someone, and that’s needing someone. It’s when you batter and bruise and break yourself just so that you can mould yourself into being theirs. All the while tricking yourself into believing that it’s still good and wholesome and for the best, because this is what you WANT. Compromise is good and healthy, but too much compromise and you end up betraying yourself just so you can have them. And the most painful part is knowing that a few months ago, when you first met them, when everything was unblemished and naturally perfect, there was no concealing the bad. There was no bad. No one had hurt the other. The question is, how many times do you forgive under the name of love?
If I saw another person in my shoes, I’d tell them to walk away, to respect themselves, to make their mother proud. But perhaps I wouldn’t know the full story if I was an outsider looking in. An outsider wouldn’t know how painfully and impossibly in love with you I am. An outsider wouldn’t know that I find it impossible to let go of any good that’s ever happened in my life, impossible to end chapters in my life. And if the chapters are ended forcefully, I’ll torture my mind by living through every single happy moment again and again and again and again.
I can still smell the washing powder on your jumper the first time I kissed you. I remember how hot it was in summer when we lived beside the river on a diet of red wine and pot. When we first got to know each other, sat on our bench listening to old soul into the early hours of the morning. Everything buzzed slightly, as if charged with electricity. The air tasted of excitement. I’d never done this before. I was seventeen, you nineteen. I lost my virginity to you. The first time we made love, we listened to John Martyn on repeat, in the darkness, on my single, rickety child’s bed. Afterwards you told me I was about to have the best cig of my life. I told you I’d had better.
I like being yours. Although even there I am doubtful. I feel inadequate, which I hate. It leads me to think I’ve changed. I would have spat in the face of anyone who felt inferior in some way to another person, told them they were a miracle just for being them, and if no one liked the look of them then they just shouldn’t look. Because I know we are all superb creatures.
So why do I feel constantly…lacking? Not interesting enough, not clever enough, no way NEAR beautiful enough for you, blah blah blah. It makes me angry. How can my mind possibly be so conflicted? I know that exterior beauty is a sham endorsed by capitalism and advocated by stupid people. But I also hate myself. It hurts, feels as though my brain might tear in half. I love you. I want you. I want to be yours. But I resent that. No one should want that after what you put me through. After hearing what you said. I’m scared. Scared of just how much I’m willing to sacrifice to be with you, would I know when to stop? And most of all I’m scared that if you ever saw this you’d leave me, again. I can’t do it, when you leave me. I’m ashamed of that fact. But when you leave me, I die.” — submitted anonymously to berlin-artparasites
Honesty
“I love being horribly straightforward. I love sending reckless text messages (because how reckless can a form of digitized communication be?) and telling people I love them and telling people they are absolutely magical humans and I cannot believe they really exist. I love saying, Kiss me harder, and You’re a good person, and, You brighten my day. I live my life as straight-forward as possible.
Because one day, I might get hit by a bus.
Maybe it’s weird. Maybe it’s scary. Maybe it seems downright impossible to just be—to just let people know you want them, need them, feel like, in this very moment, you will die if you do not see them, hold them, touch them in some way whether its your feet on their thighs on the couch or your tongue in their mouth or your heart in their hands.
But there is nothing more beautiful than being desperate.
And there is nothing more risky than pretending not to care.
We are young and we are human and we are beautiful and we are not as in control as we think we are. We never know who needs us back. We never know the magic that can arise between ourselves and other humans.
We never know when the bus is coming.” — Rachel C. Lewis, Tell The People You Love That You Love Them #TodaysMantra
Loss
“Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.”
— Mary Elizabeth Frye
The F***ing Truth
“Wanna know the fucking truth? Nobody is fucking happy. Nobody has skin made from oil paint and sunlight. Nobody fucking understands this world. Fuck, nobody probably understands math as much as they claim. You’re here one day and the next you’re not. God? Religion? I’ve learned a lot more about the world by eating acid and swallowing pills. Tell me what your church has done for you? Tell me if you have holes in your mouth from speaking lies? Wanna know the fucking truth? Pity is just another word for pathetic. Drink beer and watch the sunrise from every rooftop. Take photographs naked. Take photographs kissing. Take photographs having sex. Stop making everything about sexuality. Wanna know the fucking truth? Nobody really gives a damn if you lost your virginity at fourteen or if you were the president in high school. Wanna know the fucking truth? There is no such thing as the right person. People leave. They change like ocean currents, they leave you with bruises in your calves. And you wanna know the fucking truth? You get better. You learn to love. You find God in between the cracks of a wall when you’re puking your limbs out. You wanna know the fucking truth? Go find it.” — Iryna Klishch, something someone should have told me when i was eighteen
“Whatever happened to our dreams? The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us. And no, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of someday easing my fit into a mold. It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up. This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.” -Randall Munroe
Hope
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” ― Eric Roth
“There’s so much more to life than finding someone who will want you, or being sad over someone who doesn’t. There’s a lot of wonderful time to be spent discovering yourself without hoping someone will fall in love with you along the way, and it doesn’t need to be painful or empty. You need to fill yourself up with love. Not anyone else. Become a whole being on your own. Go on adventures, fall asleep in the woods with friends, wander around the city at night, sit in a coffee shop on your own, write on bathroom stalls, leave notes in library books, dress up for yourself, give to others, smile a lot. Do all things with love, but don’t romanticize life like you can’t survive without it. Live for yourself and be happy on your own. It isn’t any less beautiful, I promise.” — Emery Allen
WE SAID THIS: Find more artwork and beautiful captions on Berlin-Artparasites’ Facebook Page here.
