The Tenderness…. 

17th century astronomical art of Maria Clara Eimmart; celestial splendor from a forgotten woman who broke the bounds of her time.

(brainpickings.org)

He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

He's got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

Ada Limón, Before

the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and nessecary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world’s greatest benefactors),

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Either she loves him, or she is resolved to.

Wisława Szymborska, Portrait of a Woman tr. Regina Grol

the one that teaches water to become ice, helps grief remember how to become tears.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Beside the river are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain