I Know What The River Is Like At Night. I Know How It Tongues The Dark And Swallows The Rain And How

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token.

Mark Rothko, Statement

I remember thinking my father was mean but knowing he was kind. I remember thinking my father was kind but knowing he was mean.

Mary Ruefle, Woodtangle

An attempt to intensify the horror by containing it in symmetry.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

theories which isolate art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing, are not inherent in the subject-matter, but arise because of specifiable extraneous conditions. […] Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience

burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I was so pleased to be seen

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

I fear that to write so much about crying will tempt a universal law of irony to invite tragedy into my life.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

free me from my longing

Anna Czekanowicz, tr. Regina Grol

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

let yourself be a living part of death

Garous Abdolmalekian, Forest tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey