I Pray As If You Existed.

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

Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed.

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

I could feel his teeth, the inside of his mouth, the shape of his thighs, the texture of his skin. I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of the bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

and how it's hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

Ada Limón, Mowing

We teeter / on the brink of time, you and I, he, she, / all of us, all so worthy of pity.

Maria Bigoszewska, tr. Regina Grol

Anne Boleyn’s Tiny Golden Psalm Book - she’s said to have handed it to one of her Maid’s of Honour moments before she was executed in 1536. 

The pictures show a miniature of Henry Vlll on the left, with gothic cursive script on the facing page, and the gold tracery covers.