"Honest," he said. "I didn't mean to scare you. Honest. I can live without a lot of things, but I didn't want you to take your feet away from me just because I didn't go to jail like I was supposed to. I don't have a real life like most people, I've missed a lot. Don't take your feet away from me too."
Toni Morrison · Tar Baby (1981)
2016 Romeo and Juliet
I like people whose beauty entails something individually captivating; People whose beauty is as pure as tears. Oh how glorious the human heart can be! How terrifying, if it is also linked to the soul (for the heart alone does nothing for me). This idea of the "soul" perpetually haunts me. I keep wondering whether I can altogether love people in case the idea of the soul remains forever an open question to me. I don't know if what I call "the soul" exists or not but if it does, I imagine it as a slowly dying ember. I imagine it as something dark, tormented and disgustingly gorgeous.
Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Nin's lost world: Paris in words and pictures
Behind all art is an element of desire. … Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
Mizu to sakura (water and cherry blossoms), by Maro Nagashi.
If it was a piece of paper, I would tear it. If it was bottle, I would break it. If it was a wall, I would tear it down,- but it is my heart.
- Mahmoud Darwish
She’d be flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret. She’d never known how to think of it in clear terms afraid to invade and dissolve its image. Yet it had formed in her interior a far-off and living nucleus and had never lost the magic — it sustained her in her unsolvable vagueness like the single reality that for her should always be the lost one.
Clarice Lispector, The Chandelier (trans. Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards).
“Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity… Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it,—: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymously to the outside, nameless, existing merely as necessity, as reality, as being—”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne
“A bridge is a meeting point, where those who started out—how many, now how many nights ago?—come together. Hearts uneasy in their depths. It was in the medieval city of Puente la Reina that all the pilgrims heading for Compostela, from France and Spain and Italy and other points of origin, met at the crossing of the River Arga. Except, in those days, there was no crossing. Boatmen plied the river—many of them not honest men at all, but sordid assassins who took advantage of the pilgrims! Kinds of water drown us. Evil boatmen threw many a pilgrim to his watery death. Then an act of grace supervened. The queen of Spain was moved to pity for the pilgrims’ difficult situation. She gave it some thought. How could she defend them? Why not a bridge! A beautiful, antic, keyholed construction, washed by gold shadows on the underside (photograph). She smiled, when she saw it, out of the side of her eyes: “Curva peligrosa” says the sign on the bridge to this day. Deadly slant. There were stars in the plane trees and stars in her eyes. There were pilgrims singing on the bridge. There were boatmen who turned to worse crime. Such is the balance of human efforts.”
— Anne Carson, from “The Anthropology of Water”, in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
“Her ancient gestures, her perfume, the infinite intimacy of her rage,”
— Christina Peri-Rossi, The Bacchante (trans. Carol Thickstunt)