She Taught Me The Poems Of These Death-facing Women And I Understood Them To Be My Mothers.

Rock paintings in the Chauvet Cave (France), some of the oldest cave paintings in the world.

They date back 30 – 32,000 years ago, from the Aurignacian tradition of the Upper Paleolithic.  The cave was closed off by a rock fall around 20,000 years ago, and was rediscovered in 1994.

You never refuse. You simply don't speak.

Alicja Rybałko, A Prayer for the Forbidden Fruit tr. Regina Grol

we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

I wish I had something else. A redemptive imagination

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede

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

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

Someone was and was here and then suddenly disappeared and is stubbornly gone.

Wisława Szymborska, A Cat in an Empty Apartment tr. Regina Grol

“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

How I did waste and exhaust my heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water