- Take It All / - It’s Too Little

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

You're the muscle / I cut from the bone and still the bone / remembers, still it wants (so much it wants)

Ada Limón, In A Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me

To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.

Richard Siken, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors

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

A great halo And a tightening in the throat

Dorota Chróścielewska, tr. Regina Grol

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

And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn't know then that it wasn't even love I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Ada Limón, Calling Things What They Are

Until I come to understand that to be saved doesn't mean to save but to survive.

Dagna Ślepowrońska, tr. Regina Grol

I always want to see you laughing. It belongs to you.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

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

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett