‘Agamemnon,’ Aeschylus (translated By Anne Carson)

So the truth is he didn't fall in love either, he fell into Faith

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

It may be that we have become more interesting to each other at the expense of trust.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

Look how much sadness you can make from showing sadness restrained.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

I am only as much as I'm not.

Dagna Ślepowrońska, tr. Regina Grol

The light is astounding, a hammer.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

the light is not something you see, exactly. You don't look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don't look. It is like being in the same room as a man you love. Other people are in the room. He may be smoking a cigarette. And you know you are not strong enough to look at him (yet) although the fact that he is there, silent and absent beside a thin wisp of cigarette smoke, hammers you. You rest your chin on your hand, like a saint on a pillar. Moments elongate and drop. A radiance is hitting your skin from somewhere, every nerve begins to burn outward through the surface, your lungs float in a substance like rage, sweet as rage, no! - don't look.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

How much more drama can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

Ada Limón, “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”

Everything, in fact, was something else.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add me to the sum of her.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?

audaces: a study in political phraseology

“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal

catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”

the two voices of virgil’s aeneid 

in defence of catiline

antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc

the duplicate revelation of portia’s death

virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire

the taciturnity of aeneas

gender and the metaphorics of translation