As If You Could Not Enjoy Love Without Pain.

A bird pecks at the corroded corner of the sky

Garous Abdolmalekian, Long Poem of Loneliness tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

“I drink to our ruined house To the evil of my life To our loneliness together And I drink to you— To the lying lips that have betrayed us, To the dead-cold eyes, To the fact that the world is brutal and coarse To the fact that God did not save us.”

— Anna Akhmatova, Last Toast, trans. by Kate Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

theories which isolate art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing, are not inherent in the subject-matter, but arise because of specifiable extraneous conditions. […] Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I believe in ending sentences with a preposition in order to give the ideas a way out.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

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

Winter is king, raindrops sing, gardens drip with loss.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty

Everything, in fact, was something else.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.

- Robert Desnos