I Am A Song About The Great Pain Of Joy.

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

(brainpickings.org)

what I have done is risked everything for that hour, that hour in the black night, where one flashing light looks like love,

Ada Limón, Glow

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

Remains of colour on temple columns.

The light is astounding, a hammer.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

“Dionysus is a god who takes human form, a powerful male who looks soft and feminine, a native of Thebes who dresses as a foreigner. His parentage is mixed between divine and human; he is and is not a citizen of Thebes; his power has both feminine and masculine aspects. He does not merely cross boundaries, he blurs and confounds them, makes nonsense of the lines between Greek and foreign, between female and male, between powerful and weak, between savage and civilized. He is the god of both tragedy and comedy, and in his presence the distinction between them falls away, as both comedy and tragedy…”

— Paul Woodruff, The Bacchae (Translated and Annotated) 

He just cried on, this hopeless hard retching as if the tears were shards and each one cut as it came out.

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

How imagining death can make it easier 

to live and I agree and say, It’s called die

before you die.

- Ada Limón, The Long Ride

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

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book