And Of Course There Was Music, Though It Was Me And My Incessant Remembering.

I say we but it's just an illusion that our hearts beat in unison

Wisława Szymborska, We tr. Regina Grol

- take it all / - it’s too little

- Agata Tuszyńska, tr. Regina Grol

Tears are a sign of powerlessness, a ‘woman’s weapon.’ It has been a very long war.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

“Tell me what you know about the body, and I will tell you how it must turn against itself.”

— Seam: ‘Interview with a Birangona’ by Tarfia Faizullah

I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and nessecary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world’s greatest benefactors),

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outward from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?

audaces: a study in political phraseology

“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal

catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”

the two voices of virgil’s aeneid 

in defence of catiline

antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc

the duplicate revelation of portia’s death

virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire

the taciturnity of aeneas

gender and the metaphorics of translation