But Indirectly Children Know Everything There Is To Know. They Just Don't Know Why.

we have / bartered away heaven, / in starry nights, in the apple / orchards of Paradise.

- Marina Tsvetaeva, We shall not escape Hell tr. Elaine Feinstein

I want them to go on kissing, without fear. I want to watch them and not feel so abandoned by hands. Come home. Everything is begging you.

Ada Limón, It Begins With The Trees

but you, in this wilderness alone You've got to live to take the next bite

Dagna Ślepowrońska, tr. Regina Grol

“Those lovers are mostly gone. My hands remain—: like altars.”

— Natalie Diaz, from The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones—: These Hands If Not Gods (via wishbzne)

It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outward from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

green leaves / torn straight from the cross

- Agata Tuszyńska, Faith tr. Regina Grol

Despair recognizes its own ridiculousness

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

Some of the first photographs ever taken inside the Lascaux caves (France, 1947).

How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?

Niall Williams, History of the Rain