“I Believe One Writes Because One Has To Create A World In Which One Can Live. I Could Not Live In

He lives in a small country of hope which is his heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

I want to say the poet is never afraid because he is unceasingly afraid, and therefore cannot become that which he already is

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

if the grief is unbearable is there another way to live with it that is not the same as bearing it?

- Judith Butler

Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making it out of ourselves

Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now 

those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.

Mark Rothko, The Romantics Were Prompted... 

I wish I had something else. A redemptive imagination

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede

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

Still he looked; still he paused. It is these pauses that are our undoing.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Every moon will be a moon of surrender

Ada Limón, The Noisiness of Sleep