The True And Serious Beauty  Of Trees, How It Seemed Insane That They Should Offer This To Us, How Unworthy

To live in this tragedy without raptures

Alicja Rybałko, Curriculum Vitae tr. Regina Grol

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of the bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

in that largeness of heart, that capacity for feeling and desire and passion, there's some kind of holiness.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

october, mary oliver

we have / bartered away heaven, / in starry nights, in the apple / orchards of Paradise.

- Marina Tsvetaeva, We shall not escape Hell tr. Elaine Feinstein

the smoke / carries my longing / - to Heaven

Barbara Brandys, By the Fire tr. Regina Grol

Raptures could be little or large, could come one after the other in a torrent, or singly and separated by long dullness. For him life was a constant drama of seeing and blindness, but, when seeing, the world would suddenly seem to him laden.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando