To Make Something Beautiful Should Be Enough. It Isn't. It Should Be.

Sharon Olds, “True Love”

- take it all / - it’s too little

- Agata Tuszyńska, tr. Regina Grol

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

Ada Limón, Before

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.

- Robert Desnos

Remains of colour on temple columns.

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

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

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

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

The light is nervous and quiet -

Urszula M. Benka, To the Last Man on Earth, In the Hour of His Death tr. Regina Grol

Either she loves him, or she is resolved to.

Wisława Szymborska, Portrait of a Woman tr. Regina Grol