You Never Refuse. You Simply Don't Speak.

And your lips rise from the dead in each of my smiles.

Wisława Szymborska, A Sentence tr. Regina Grol

To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.

Richard Siken, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors

I take the soil in

my clean fingers and to say

I weep is untrue, weep is too

musical a word. I heave

into the soil. You cannot die.

I just came to this life

again, alive in my silent way.

- Ada Limón, Invasive

Death wanted to be this beautiful but we buried it

Garous Abdolmalekian, Sea tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

For his conversations about action (we have had more than one) are all descriptions of God

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

So often a metaphor arrives in the physical world with violence.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

Still he looked; still he paused. It is these pauses that are our undoing.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Someone was and was here and then suddenly disappeared and is stubbornly gone.

Wisława Szymborska, A Cat in an Empty Apartment tr. Regina Grol