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“June: covered in dirt with flushed cheeks of lilac. You’ve stitched your wounds with gold thread, hours painted on the kitchen walls.”

— Ana Carrizo, June

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“Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular. A flicker and drag emanates from the idea of it. Language seems capable of girding the oceanic earth, like the world-serpent of Norse legend. It is as if language places a shaping pressure upon our territories of habitation and voyage; thrashing, independent, threatening to rive our known world apart."

— Vahni Capildeo, Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere

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“Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it. in this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony.”

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

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“Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no “erogenous zones.” […] It is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic; the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.”

— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

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“She puts herself on a level of intransigence and perfection; she has a taste for the definitive and absolute: if she cannot control the future, she wants to attain the eternal.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (trans. Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier)

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“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

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“With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.”

— Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

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“Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent human being in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”

— Anaïs Nin, The Diaries of Anaïs Nin

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“But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning ‘to grow long,’ and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion. The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.”

— Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

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“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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“I thirst for you. Don’t walk away from me. Tell me everything, even if you have to hurt me a little. No one in the world will love anything you do as much as I do. Tell me about the you I love, the one who’s a little shivery. Let yourself go. Don’t force yourself on me, just because you don’t want to worry or help me. When you strip in front of me, I finally understand why I was born. I love you.”

— Maria Casarès, Correspondance to Albert Camus

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“The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear.”

— Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

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“To be Venetian and to know how to live in Venice is an art. It is our way of living, so different from the rest of the world. Venice is built not only of stone but of a very thin web of words, spoken and remembered, of stories and legends, of eye-witness accounts and hearsay. To work and operate in Venice means first of all to understand its differences and its fragile equilibrium. In Venice we move delicately and in silence. And with great subtlety. We are very Byzantine people, and that is certainly not easy to understand.”

— Count Girolamo Marcello, The City of Falling Angels

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“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Left-Handed Commencement Address

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“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you.”

— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

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“There is Florence and there is Firenze. Firenze is the place where the citizens of the capital of Tuscany live and work. Florence is the place where the rest of us come to look. Firenze goes back around two thousand years to the Romans and, at least in legend, the Etruscans. But Florence was founded in perhaps the early 1800s when expatriate French, English, Germans, and not a few Americans settled here to meditate on art and the locale—the genius of the place—that produced it. Over the next two centuries a considerable part of the rest of the world followed them for shorter visits—“visit” being derived from the Latin vistare, “to go to see,” and, further back, from videre, simply “to see”—in the form of what came to be called tourism. The Florentines are here, as they have always been, to live and work; to primp, boast, cajole, and make sardonic, acerbic asides; to count their money and hoard their real estate, the stuff—la roba—in their attics and cellars, and their secrets. We are here for the view.”

— Robert Clark, Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence

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“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

― Alain de Botton, On Love