“Let love / be the light that shows again / the blossom to the root.”
Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems; “Tree of Life”
“It was dark, then it was dark again. It was dark so long we thought the day was lost.”
Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words; “The Endless Indian Nights”
“The first section of Darkness is the densest, Dear — After that, Light trembles in —”
Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, November 1883
“Following a fearful night I do not quite remember came a kind / of dawn, not light, / But something we could see by.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems; “Dream of Saba”
“There is nothing to be done but to go ahead with life moment by moment … try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside of me.”
Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield
“Love is not consolation, it is light.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace; “Detachment”
“This night (she pointed to herself) is irreparable, but where you are (pointed at me) it’s still light.”
Anna Akhmatova, quoted by Nikolay Punin in The Diaries of Nikolay Punin
“This is the way of love, to survive only in perpetual loss.”
Do Nguyen Mai, Ghosts Still Walking; “The Forever Way”
“I have thought of you often since the darkness,”
Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson
“This is us. This is all of us. Before we knew this life would shatter, moving wild and unwanted through the dark and the light.”
Safiya Sinclair, excerpt of “Family Portrait”
“…there are still so many people of courage who go on fighting in spite of all these reasons for despair.”
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
“Still, a great deal of light falls on everything.”
Vincent van Gogh, in a letter
“No, the abyss isn’t infinite. A half-light lurks even there.”
Traci Brimhall, Our Lady of the Ruins; “The Labyrinth”
“I hope you have the power of hope,”
Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson
“Maybe this is what love is, / And always will be, all my life. / Whispering, I give her an inch of hope / To bite on, like a bullet.”
Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems; “Aunt Elsie’s Night Music”
“Alas, I know that these consolations amount to so little, for they are quickly used up and the heartache incessantly replenishes on its own.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to Magdalena Schwammberger
“Everyone is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying all, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don’t know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end.”
George Sand, in a letter to Gustave Flaubert
“Tenderness is always timely.”
Susan Sontag, Alice in Bed
“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile, the world goes on.”
Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems; “Wild Geese”
“How lightly we learn to hold hope, as if it were an animal that could turn around and bite your hand. And still we carry it the way a mother would, carefully, from one day to the next.”
Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August; “Insha’Allah”
“Make it your ambition to take heart.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to Magdalena Schwammberger
“Faith, not fear, she said. She’d heard that once and was trying to stamp the phrase on her mind. At the time, she couldn’t speak it aloud.”
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
“Tonight there is no ocean that does not sing. Even sorrow, which we have felt again in all our lands, has hands.”
Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words; “With the Greeks”
“In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.”
“This is the human way, she thought. On the edge of destruction, at the end of all things, we still dance. And hope.”
Rosamund Hodge, Crimson Bound
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