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“Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.”

― Edna O’Brien, In the Forest

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“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed. And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.”

— Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song: A Villanelle

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“But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges.”

― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

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“And my heart, rubbed clean with maniac luck, gets what it wanted for once:”

— Tess Gallagher, from “Heart-Mirror”, in Dear Ghosts: Poems

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“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling—depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage—are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”

— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

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“Night, to ancient people, was not an ‘absence of light’ or a negative darkness, but a powerful source of energy and inspiration. At night the cosmos reveals herself in her vastness, the earth opens to moisture and germination under moonlight, and the magnetic serpentine current stirs itself in the underground waters–just as the thick, snakey spray of stars, the Milky Way, winds across the night sky. Moon phases are a part of the great cosmic dance in which everything participates: the movement of the celestial bodies, the pulse of tides, the circulation of blood and sap in animals and plants. Observation of the night sky, of the stars, and especially of the moon, was the beginning of mathematics and science.”

— Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother 

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“Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In poetry, wonder is coupled with the joy of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.”

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

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“Inside the dark cave glimmer the hanging rats with the cruciform wings of bats. I see downy and black spiders. Mice and rats run frightened along the ground and up the walls. Between the rocks the scorpion. Crabs, just like themselves since prehistory, through deaths and births, would look like threatening beasts if they were the size of a man. Old cockroaches crawl in the murky light. And all of this is me.”

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (trans. Stefan Tobler)

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“I am so broad. I am coherent—my canticle is profound. Slow. But rising. Rising still. If it rises much more it will become full moon and silence, and phantasmagoric lunar soil. On the lookout for the time that stops. What I write you is serious. It will become a hard imperishable object. What is coming is unexpected. To be uselessly sincere I must say that now it is six fifteen in the morning.”

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (trans. Stefan Tobler)

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“In this instant-now I’m enveloped by a wandering diffuse desire for marvelling and millions of reflections of the sun in the water that runs from the faucet onto the lawn of a garden all ripe with perfumes, garden and shadows that I invent right here and now and that are the concrete means of speaking in this my instant of life. My state is that of a garden with running water. In describing it I try to mix words that time can make itself. What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look.”

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (trans. Stefan Tobler)

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“Love makes you an anthropologist of your own life. What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What is this language we have got backed up into on long worst fire nights like a bad translation? It is important to keep recording the dialect forms, tracking the idioms. Yes there is a violence in it.”

— Anne Carson, from “The Anthropology of Water,” in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

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“He-she was already there atop the mountain, and she was personalized in the he and he was personalized in the she. The androgynous mixture created a being so terribly beautiful, so horrifically stupefying that the participants couldn’t take it all in at once: as a person adjusts little by little to the dark and gradually starts to discern things. Gradually they discerned the She-he and when the He-she appeared before them in a brightness that emanated from him-her, they paralyzed by the Beautiful would say: ‘Ah, ah.’”

— Clarice Lispector, from “Where Were You at Night” in Where Were You at Night (trans. Katrina Dodson)

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“Relationships are mysterious. We doubt the positive qualities in others, seldom the negative. You will say to your partner: do you really love me? Are you sure you love me? You will ask this a dozen times and drive the person nuts. But you never ask: are you really mad at me? Are you sure you’re angry? When someone is angry, you don’t doubt it for a moment. Yet the reverse should be true. We should doubt the negative in life, and have faith in the positive.”

— Christopher Pike, Remember Me

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“The night turns darker. I am sinking into painless melancholy. It is not so bad. Only to be expected. Tomorrow I might experience some happiness, not exactly ecstasy, just happiness. And that is not so bad either. True, but I am scarcely enjoying my pact with humdrum existence.”

— Clarice Lispector, from “As You Sleep,” in Selected Cronicas (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

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“Night is a house, this one sound its walls. Ear stops at listening, mind stops at matching, spirit forgets the ten thousand things. We lie side by side in the dark, two halves of a knucklebone—the same knucklebone? Crickets are.”

— Anne Carson, from “The Anthropology of Water,” in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

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“Fanning herself, the fat matron is lost in thought. The fan helps her to think as she sits there fanning herself rigorously. Then with a sudden click, she abruptly arrests her thoughts. Empty, smiling, rigid in her tight corset, she looks distracted. The fan reclines distracted and open on her ample bosom. ‘No doubt, they’ll all find a husband’, she concedes like a visitor being received in a drawing-room. But suppressing her agitation, there she is fanning herself with a thousand sparrows’ wings.”

— Clarice Lispector, “Summer Ball,” in Selected Cronicas (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

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“Poisoned flowers in a vase. Red, blue, pink, they carpet the air. How they transform a hospital ward. I have never seen such beautiful and dangerous flowers. So this is your secret. Your secret resembles you so closely that it tells me nothing beyond what I already know. And I know so little, as if I were your enigma. Just as you are mine.”

— Clarice Lispector, “Your Secret,” in Selected Cronicas (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)