Dread & Crisis · the floor giving way
Words for dread and existential crisis
For 3am thoughts, for the floor giving way, for “what is the point?”
One verified literary line a day. A private place to write what it brings up.
An existential crisis feels like no one has ever felt this before. They have. Philosophers, poets and novelists have stood exactly here and written their way through.
“In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray”
This is one line. The rest of the Dread & Crisis thread is inside Saudade — one line a day, chosen by a person, with a private page to write what it brings up. Over the weeks, your pages become a book of your own.
Read tomorrow’s lineWriters in this thread
- Fyodor Dostoevsky on crisis and existence
- Friedrich Nietzsche on crisis and existence
- Miguel de Unamuno on existence and dread
- Seneca on existence and despair
- Gerard Manley Hopkins on crisis and dread
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on existence and dread
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on existence
- William Hazlitt on existence
- Lieh Tzu on existence and dread
- Herman Melville on crisis and existence
- Boethius on despair and existence
- Leonardo da Vinci on existence and dread
- Machado de Assis on existence
- Dante Alighieri on crisis and existence
- Thomas Hardy on existence
- Sarah Bernhardt on existence
- Percy Bysshe Shelley on despair
- Plato on existence
- Phillis Wheatley on existence
- Francisco Goya on dread and crisis
- Auguste Rodin on existence
- Benvenuto Cellini on existence
- Anne Wharton on dread
- Anne Killigrew on existence
- Anna Laetitia Barbauld on existence
- Henrietta, Lady O’Neill on despair
Their lines arrive one a day, inside the app.
For readers, writers and artists
For readers, poetry lovers, and anyone who keeps a short private writing habit. Every day’s line can be a prompt: writers can use it to find a place to begin, poets a first line, painters and illustrators a mood. Nobody reads your page but you.
Try this
3am is where you are. What does it look like? Are you alone, or with someone?
Why these lines
Every line in Saudade is chosen by a person, quoted word for word from the original book, and carries its author, source and year. Nothing is generated, paraphrased or scraped. Never AI.
Most quote sites are full of lines nobody ever said. Ours you can look up.