disertitudo

[disertitudo]

The nobility of the heart — of the organ. Unremitting caution. It is always first to sound the alarm. I could say: it is not love that makes my heart pound, but my pounding heart — that makes love.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922.

[disertitudo]

The desire to go deep: to the depths of the night, the depths of love. Love: a gap in time.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922.

[disertitudo]

I never want to lay my head on the chest, always in the chest! Never — fall down before! Always fall into (the abyss.)

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922.

[disertitudo]

I want to be destroyed in you, that is, I want to be you. But you are no longer in yourself; you are already entirely in me. I get lost in my own breast (in you). I cannot lose myself in your breast, because you aren’t in there. But maybe I am there? (Reciprocal love. The souls have exchanged homes). No, I’m not there either. There’s nothing there. I myself am not anywhere. There is my breast — and you. I love you with yourself. Seizure? Yes. But better than barter.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Earhtly SIgns: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922.

[disertitudo]

"Belles petites mains qui fermerez mes yeux"

Paul Verlaine, from "XVII", Sagesse

[disertitudo]

I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.

Anna Akhmatova, from "A Land Not Mine, Still" in Selected Poems.

[disertitudo]

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

Paul Verlaine, Langeur (From Jadis et naguère)

[disertitudo]

I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.

Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

[disertitudo]

Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

Arthur Rimbaud, Le Bateau Ivre

[disertitudo]

Unhappiness has been my god

Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer

[disertitudo]

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

[disertitudo]

To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions