I Lay Exhaling Human Feelings

In a moment I could destroy the entire legend, from beginning to end, destroy everything, except the fundamentals

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

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

“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's got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

free me from my longing

Anna Czekanowicz, tr. Regina Grol

since you were unable to take all the bad you were given learn now to fight with your nails for every inch of ground under your foot

Anna Czekanowicz, A Polish Mother tr. Regina Grol

I stare, recognize the ghost of old feelings. ‘What do I remember / that was shaped / as this thing is shaped?’

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

the equable but confused light of a summer’s morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he'd admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it,

Ada Limón, Cyrus & The Snakes