• "Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him." - E. M. Forster, Howards End
  • "Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
  • "Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again." - Homer, The Iliad
  • "You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important." - James Baldwin
  • "I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close." - Pablo Neruda
  • "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold to it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?" - Voltaire, Candide
  • "Expectations too great to be met, intensity too great to endure, imagination too wild to be believed, maybe you have been there. Congratulations and condolences." - Louis C. Smith, in a review for Love and Limerence
  • "How terrible it is to love something that death can touch."
  • "We're like that. The webbiness, the gregariousness of the many are what we can't abide." - Amy Candide, A Whippoorwill in the Woods
  • "Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?" - Emily Brontë, Remembrance
  • "Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before" - Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vanity Fair, 1920
  • "It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another—it’s one damn thing over & over." - Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a letter to Arthur Davison Ficke
  • "To speak is to fall into tautology ... The certitude that everything has been written negates us, or renders us phantasmal." - Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
jan 15 2021 ∞
jul 30 2022 +