Amal El-Mohtar And Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”

— John Greenleaf Whittier (b. 17 December 1807)

“You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to Véra Nabokov, Letters to Véra, ed. and transl. Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)

Sylvia Plath

Margaret Atwood, from “Dream”, Dearly

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Mary Bowles (about December 1858)

“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”

— Barry H. Gillespie

Margarita Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, Rien ne va plus

“My tenderest kisses, beloved little being — I dreamt about you.”

— Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), in a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980),  Friday [7 July 1939], Amiens, in “Letters To Sartre”, translated by Quintin Hoare

“There is a kind of person for whom an enthusiasm for boredom represents the beginning of philosophy.”

— Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

“IPHIGENIA : I shall wash blood with blood to get rid of the defilement—”

— Euripides, Iphigenia Among the Taurians (tr. by Anne Carson)