“…and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”—
Emily Dickinson - from The Letters of Emily Dickinson
“…and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”—
Emily Dickinson - from The Letters of Emily Dickinson
“I think of you in bed, your tongue half chocolate, half ocean…”—
Anne Sexton, from “Eighteen Days Without You” (December 11th) in The Complete Poems
“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reverse.”—
William S. Burroughs - from a letter to Jack Kerouac
“I wish I never met you and I wish you never left. You taste like a river in June.”—
Arkaye Kierulf, from “Spaces”
“Write each of your poems, tersely, mercilessly, with blood– as if it were your last.”— Blaga Dimitrova, from ‘Ars Poetica’ featured in Scars (translated by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman)
“I discovered I must must must love, insanely.”— Forugh Farrokhzad, from ‘Window’ featured in Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad
“The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.”—
Anna Akhmatova, from Anna Of All The Russias: A Life Of Anna Akhmatova
“You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.”— Susan Sontag, from ‘Letter to Borges’ featured in Where the Stress Falls
“I kissed her. She smelled of beer and smoke and April rain.”— Audre Lorde, from Zami: A New Spelling of my Name
“I need to emerge from tiny time-stopping moments; I need to exist inside dawn’s light. I need to give in to the presence of everything humble, boundlessly sincere and extraordinarily terrifying.”—
Virginia Woolf, from A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909