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— Vladimir Nabokov, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn (Trans. by Thomas Karshan)

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Findlinge, Sterne, schwarz und voll Sprache: benannt / nach gebrochenem Schwur.

Paul Celan, “Allerseelen”

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How does one hate a country, or love one? [...] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

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“But you are gazing at me the way God gazed at Adam and I am embarrassed by your look of love and possession and pride. I want to go now and cover myself with fig leaves.”

- Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

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My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. “Listen,” he said, “life and no escape.”

Anne Carson,  “The Wishing Jewel: Introduction to Water Margins,” The Anthropology of Water, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (via lifeinpoetry)

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“Cautiously, clumsily, I loaded the revolver, then turned off the light. The thought of death, which had once so frightened me, was now an intimate and simple affair. I was afraid, terrible afraid of the monstrous pain the bullet might cause me; but to be afraid of the black velvety sleep, of the even darkness, so much more acceptable and comprehensible than life’s motley insomnia? Nonsense -- how could one be afraid of that? Standing in the middle of the dark room, I unbuttoned my shirt, leaned forward from the hops, felt for and located my heart between the ribs. It was throbbing like a small animal you want to carry to a safe place, a fledgling or field mouse to which you cannot explain that there is nothing to fear, that, on the contrary, you are acting for its own good. But it was so much alive, my heart; I found it somehow repugnant to press the barrel tight against the think skin under which a portable world was resiliently pulsating.”

-- Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye

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Artist’s impression and illustrations of ancient observations of Planets, comets, eclipse, moon, constellations, etc. (Images taken from the book: Astronomy for the use of schools and academies, Astronomy for amateurs, Elements of astronomy, A short course in astronomy and the use of the globes)

Credit: Internet Archive Book Images

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Though as a child I read every fairy story I could lay my hands on, I never liked the princesses. I was fond only of the princes. I was all the fonder of princes murdered or princes fated for death. I was completely in love with any youth who was killed.

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

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But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

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Vivek Shraya, in Even This Page Is White

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You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends. In theory you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the romantics and the religious are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (via theclassicsreader)

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When they ask you / where you're from, tell them your name / was fleshed from the toothless mouth / of a war-woman. / That you were not born / but crawled, headfirst-- / into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them / the body is a blade that sharpens / by cutting.

Ocean Vuong, from “Headfirst” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds

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Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses, With soft rugs-- The last of Victoriana. Let the stars Plummet to their dark address, Let the mercuric  Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well, You are the one Solid the Spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

Sylvia Plath, from “Nick and the Candlestick” in Ariel

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Alice Tippit Telle, 2015 oil on canvas, 24" x 20

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To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor.

Roland Barthes, S/Z

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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886 American) • A Word - Third Series 1896