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Current read: The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

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"Love said to me You are not Crazy enough You don't Fit in this house. I went and Became crazy Crazy enough To be in chains."

— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi

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"Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself."

— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love

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"We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one, and decide that everything that lies within it will somehow be free of our faults and hence lovable. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through union with the beloved, hope somehow to maintain [against evidence of all self-knowledge] a precarious faith in the species."

— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love

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“My arms were always tight and craving to embrace. I wanted to embrace and hold the light, the wind, the sun, the night, the whole world.”

— Anaïs Nin, House of Incest

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Anaïs Nin, “House of Incest” (1958)

Photomontages by Val Telberg

Source of photography

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Your love entered my house Saw me without you Put its hand over my head And said pity on you.

— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi

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Elle UK, April 2025. Photograph by Quentin Jones.

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I am a child Whose teacher is love Surely master Won't let me grow To be a fool.

— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi

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“You are open to life. I opened you.”

— Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

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Picture captured of The Great Wall of China during my trip in 2016.

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A handful of earth Cries aloud I used to be hair or I used to be bones.

— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi

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Elle UK, April 2025

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“He said it was because she was intelligent, and intelligent women mixed literature and poetry with love, which paralyzed him; and that she was positive, masculine, in some of her ways, and this intimidated him.”

— Anaïs Nin, Elena

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My blood is boiling My heart is on fire and The winter snow Is melting away From my body.

— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi