For the Love of Words

"Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine."

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"Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and no unsayable- admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears- rose around them."

Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories

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"The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine."

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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The sadness is under the thoughts. It’s like when you’re on a camping trip, and it’s really cold, and you put on extra socks, and an extra sweater, but you still can’t get warm, because the coldness is in your bones.

Humans of New York

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You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

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The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence...it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

Oscar Wilde

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And there is nothing left to do But to kiss once again, and part, Nay, there is nothing we should rue, I have my beauty,--you your Art, Nay, do not start, One world was not enough for two Like me and you.

Oscar Wilde, excerpt from Her Voice

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Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love

Claude Monet

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And what, except for you, do I feel love?

Wallace Stevens, excerpt from Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction

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What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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And I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

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Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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They smiled at the good and frowned at the bad

Luddwig Bemelmans, Madeline

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This woman, who sees without being seen, frustrates the colonizer.

Frantz Fanon

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Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.

Now, Voyager

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The day would lie before us both, long no doubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquillity we had not known before

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca