Of Loveliness In The Snow And Faithlessness In The Flood;

I was suddenly some safer form of fire.

Ada Limón, What Remains Grows Ravenous

It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

I pray as if you existed.

Maria Bigoszewska, tr Regina Grol

Everything, in fact, was something else.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

For his conversations about action (we have had more than one) are all descriptions of God

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

He's got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and be seen at the same time.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

thinking about Kait Rokowski writing, "nothing ever ends poetically, it ends and we turn it into poetry. all that blood was never once beautiful. it was just red." and losing it

My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

Willa Cather, Not Under Forty