How Imagining Death Can Make It Easier 

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

Ada Limón, Before

The world is slow to dissolve and leave us.

Matthea Harvey, Sad Little Breathing Machine

Dum pudeo pereo (as I blush, I die) says an old love song. Blood rushes to the face, at the same time the heart seems to wither on itself and snap,

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

I found this really cool list of women’s translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts! It lists English-language translations dating from the 17th century to 2015. 

From the Wikipedia page about the Fermi Paradox: Given the high scientific probability for alien existence, why can we find no evidence of their existence whatsoever?

If I had a prayer, it would say, Let this not be a mirror to the past, nor a window to the future. Let each night be only itself.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

To live in this tragedy without raptures

Alicja Rybałko, Curriculum Vitae tr. Regina Grol

theories which isolate art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing, are not inherent in the subject-matter, but arise because of specifiable extraneous conditions. […] Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience

“You / bring out the sea in me, so wade. / Wade in this.”

— Jasmine Reid, from “Instructions for the Moon,” Deus Ex Nigrum

How much more drama can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

Ada Limón, “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”