“the number of hours we have together is actually not so large. please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving.” — mikko harvey, for m.

“do you have any weapons on you? / i have a longing that’s killing me.” — mahmoud darwish, memory for forgetfulness: august, beirut, 1982.

“i want to be a warm yellow. i want to be a light blue. i want to be a colour and nothing else.” — helga floros, things i want to ask you.

“the blood on my teeth begins to taste like a poem, like religion, like the way you look at me.” — sean glatch, caffeine, pt. 1.

“my feelings for you are biblical; that is they are intense, reckless, arrogant, risky and unconcerned with the way of the world. i flaunt my bleeding wounds, madden with my certainty.” — jeanette winterson, the poetics of sex.

“do you remember your childhood? / i lay in the forest. / still, more still than any living creature. / watching the sun rise. ” — louise glück, timor mortis.

“yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime is filled with you...” — rainer maria rilke, the second elegy.

“if i offer my life to life itself, to the life to be lived and the life to be lost, i open my eyes on a world wherein I have no meaning but wounded, lacerated, sacrificed, where the divinity, in the same way, is only laceration, execution, sacrifice.” — georges bataille, guiilty.

“i am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and i thought people would see it because 'romantic' doesn't mean 'sugary.' it's dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can't attain.” ― catherine breillat, romance.

“as for myself, i am splintered by great waves. i am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. i find pieces of myself everywhere, and i cut myself handling them.” ― jeanette winterson, lighthousekeeping

“sometimes i feel like a caretaker of a museum ― a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and i'm watching over it for no one but myself.” ― haruki murakami, pinball.

“then suddenly you’re left all alone / with your body that can’t love you / and your will that can’t save you.” ― rainer maria rilke, rilke's book of hours: love poems to god

“what is a home if not the first place you learn to run from?” ― clementine von radics, courtney love prays to oregon.

“the color of god is a stain / shaped to you like a grief not yet come” ― edil hassan, ghazal.

“eat me, my love, live on me with animal-thirst … enter me and become my hunger for you.” — j. karl bogartte, a curious night for a double eclipse.

“to betray with a kiss. the reek of judas. i took the brush to clean my teeth and thought of his mouth. kiss of life, kiss of death. come kiss me so that i can read your lips, deceptions scripted and waiting to be staged. his lying heart is in his mouth. When i kissed him this morning i tasted his fear.” ― jeanette winterson, gut symmetrie.

“i am beginning to see the body as a well / and your absence as a thirst that pushes its hands down my throat, lifts the bucket, drinks and drinks.” ― sara eliza johnson, bone map: poems

“from between stars are the words we now refuse; / loneliness, longing, whatever suffering / might follow your life into the sky.” ― linda hogan, lost in the milky way.

“the lover strips the beloved of their identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. — georges bataille, erotism: death & sensuality.

“each body has its art, its precious prescribed Pose, that even in passion’s droll contortions, waltzes, Or push of pain—or when a grief has stabbed, Or hatred hacked—is its, and nothing else’s.” — gwendolyn brooks, a street in bronzeville.

“we talk so much of  light, please / let me speak on behalf / of  the good dark. let us / talk more of how dark / the beginning of a day is.” ― maggie smith, how dark the beginning.

“i know your heart is a cathedral. sometimes you visit me and your hands become birds, unfurl the whole forest.” — caitlin bailey, grete asks the hard questions

“i want you always to remember me. will you remember that i existed, and that i stood next to you here like this?” ― haruki murakami, norwegian wood.

“the heart can think of no devotion / greater than being shore to the ocean-holding the curve of one position, / counting an endless repetition.” ― robert frost, devotion

“every transformation demands as its precondition "the ending of a world--the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” ― c.g. jung, man and his symbols.

“the erotic impulse of entrails is linked to the eroticism of the twisted roots of trees. It is the rooted force of desire. my truculence. Monstrous viscera and hot lava of burning mud.” — clarice lispector, passage written by hand on the backside of the typescript for objeto gritante.

“the world puts its mouth on you and you don't say a thing. the world digs a hole in your yard and it's up to you to fill it, up to you to find something useful to do with your sadness.” ― hieu minh nguyen, outbound

“then it comes to me: yes i’ll die, / so will everyone, so has everyone. / it’s what we have in common. and for a moment, the sorrow ceased, and i saw that it hadn’t been sorrow / after all, but loneliness, and for a few moments, it was gone.” ― marine howe, october

“my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories / and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me / i love / your hands. / i will plant my hands in the garden / i will grow i know i know i know.” ― forough farrokhzad, another bird

“your desire is one capable of rest. / mine keeps its eyes open, stalks through heat that quivers, / waits to be fed.” ― leila chatti, fasting in tunis

“walking home for a moment / you almost believe you could start again. / and an intense love rushes to your heart, / and hope. it’s unendurable, unendurable.” ― franz wright, night walk

“i am condemned to be a saint or a monster: unable to be the one, unwilling to be the other.” ― roland barthes

“i imagine my love / breathing with the lungs of all things / and it reaches me / as poetry / of roses or dust.” ― adonis, beginnings of the body, ends of the sea

“we have a hunger that nothing has filled. / it grows large and rigid. / we stand in it like a room.” ― gregory orr, going out

“she had the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death—because death seems to be the truth of love, just as love is the truth of death.” ― georges bataille, about emily brontë

“my rage is a kind of domestic rage. / i learned it from my mother / who learned it from her mother before her / and so on. / surely the Greeks had a word for this.” ― suzanne buffam, enough

“you live inside me, the same way i live inside you. a moebius strip, a snake always swallowing its own tail. mutually assured destruction, maybe, or mutual deification. mutual consumption. / i will be the house that holds every part of you.” ― becca de la rosa and mabel martin, mabel podcast: ep. 28

“the wind had eaten away parts of my face and my hands. They called me ragged angel. I lay waiting.” — alejandra pizarnik, extracting the stone of madness: poems 1962 - 1972; dispatches

“i desire to die from you i want to annihilate myself within your sick whims.” — georges bataille, the dawn

“why does the mind do such things? turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. if you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.” ― margaret atwood, the blind assassin

“and i would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.” ― franz kafka, the castle

“i love it, it devours me. i adore it without illusions.” — violette leduc, thérèse et isabelle