All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream
Edgar Allan Poe
Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
Homer, The illiad
My body was trying to show me that I was carrying too much. Not just weight. But sorrow. Guilt. Rage. Fear. Love. Death.
Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A memoir.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
Harper Lee, To kill a Mockingbird
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams – this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness – and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
George Orwell, 1984
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we quiver before it.
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
I was within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustable variety of life
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick after.
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango
In the graveyard of the sea there is nothing but eternity.
Albert Camus, Mediterranean
the sweeping arm of morning
lost in the quiet. I build
a home with you out of breathing
& body, a cathedral of growth
planted where the river divides.
[someone will remember us
I say, even in another time]
the soft even parting of your hair
across your neck, the saffron robe
draped over your shoulders. If
not this, caught in memory, then
what shall remain of us?
Sappho, fragment 147 - more than two thousand years ago.
