Excerpts - Blog Posts
“Life was easy with you and it came so naturally. You were the extension of me and I would never need to finish my words, as who knew me better than you? You knew your place which was by my side. It is the little things that make the person and you would easily have kept me going for a lifetime. The way you would look at me with fire in your eyes showed me that I was the only one for you. You stole my heart and hid it away.”
— from Al Mujahid's letter to his wife
— Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War
— Mary Oliver, Entering the Kingdom
“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
— Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.”
— Rabindranath Tagore, Unending Love
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
— Sarah Williams
I have drunken deep of joy, and I will taste no other wine tonight.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
“If someday the moon calls you by your name don’t be surprised, because every night I tell her about you.”
— Shahrazad al-Khalij
“What a strange thing! To be alive beneath cherry blossoms.”
– Kobayashi Issa
Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
— W.S. Merwin
People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Complete Prose Collection; “The Brothers Karamazov”
I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.
– Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
“There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I hope that someday when I am gone, someone, somewhere, picks my soul up off of these pages and thinks, “I would have loved her.”
- Nicole Lyons, Hush
– Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
── Tom Stoppard, 1996
[text ID: We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. ]
L. V., meet me at the epilogue
L. V., meet me at the epilogue
L. V., meet me at the epilogue
L. V., meet me at the epilogue
L. V., meet me at the epilogue
L. V., meet me at the epilogue
the lover’s almanac : part one.