• “The way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound. We’re always stopping ourselves in mid–sentence because we’re so terrified of saying the wrong thing. Speaking is a kind of misery. And I guess I comfort myself by finding the rhythms and accidental poetry in everyone’s inadequate attempts to articulate their thoughts. We’re all sort of quietly suffering as we go about our days, trying and failing to communicate to other people what we want and what we believe.”

— Annie Baker

• “People love to clean their ears and I love people very much They are everywhere! Every single thing I love I love for windows only and if one window reflects another then friends for me it’s all over And in the windows are trees and in the windows are people What are they even doing with their hunger and in their new shirts They are taking care of themselves and they are taking each other out for lunch Oh even the rain has to love them People are just too attractive! and the rain places itself on the window in order to be closer to the people the ones who are eating The ones who are busting out vigor Oh people You have to love people They are so much like ourselves”

— Heather Christle, “People Are a Living Structure Like a Coral Reef,” from What Is Amazing

• “I’m restless and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside myself. It’s just that I don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it scratches like barbs.”

— Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva

• “… we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing. We write so that the life around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control. Writing is a way of trying to evacuate, through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper. To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is what we dream about when we write. But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters. Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of the paper, we can never pass into that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve. So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves.”

— Michel Foucault in an interview with Claude Bonnefoy, 1968

• “i’m bleeding, i’m not just making conversation” - richard siken
• "“Wherever you are it’s okay. You can come back from it. Whatever happened to you down there, whatever the world looks like now, that’s not how it always looks. That’s not how it’s always going to look. There’s more. There’s always more.” - patrick ness
• "“I say this to you with my body which is defective / which has suffered and suffers still / which survives / which is whole / which is wholly ordinary and common unto me / which is alive whether or not it was ever meant to be / If the body wants to be open could you let it be open / could you let it be / for remember there is grace in letting a thing be itself / or would you revile the opening / would you shun or disgust or run from the widening hole / Or would you sit at the edge of the hole / sit and listen and not flee” - Bronwyn Valentine
• “I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.” — Anaïs Nin, from Henry and June
• "“i want / a want / that cannot be named for me / i want a queerness / i cannot be defined out of / i want to think of a desire / without a turn in my guts” — Lip Manegio
• “I’m not really so hard & cynical after all — in fact I’m still dangerously soft.”

— Tennessee Williams, from Notebooks

• I don’t think any of us, here in the eye of the storm, can grasp how devastating it has been for much of the human race to be alienated from their own bodies and the needs and desires of the body. The body is everything—the locus of all our experiences, our entire existence. To turn the nature of our relationship with the body from harmony & collaboration to antipathy & constant strife is to devastate us emotionally, cognitively, and biologically. Even if we begin to repair this damage now, and even if the earth body can support our human bodies for long enough, we’ll see the fallout from this devastation for many centuries, and likely longer
• "Love is love and love is to not be taken for granted or belittled. To me, the question is not, "Is this person my soulmate?' but "Is there real love here?' Not "Who is my soulmate?" but "Do I give and receive love generously and unselfishly?" Not "When will I meet my soulmate?" but "Am I ready to be in an intensely loving relationship, ready to be challenged for growth?'
• "I'm so lonely in the world I want to peel all my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father." - Kthleen Glasgow
• “How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?” - richard siken,
• “What poetry has taught me is that if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to cry for it the other trees will learn how to. In the wake of another splintering they will say, I see you. I too am growing sideways.” - Ashe Vernon
• "I was looking for a love unlike my parents’ love or my sister’s love or the love on a foreign kitchen floor. I wanted my own kitchen to keep clean and full of bread and milk and hot sauce and a big clean empty sink where I could wash my dishes.” -rebecca dinerstein
• “Whatever I’m thinking seems pretentious and naive. Whatever I feel seems cliché and scripted. Whatever I see around me seems a tireless pantomime of tedious significance. Tragedy turns to farce, and life-affirming life becomes grotesque, filling me with revulsion. To be aware of all this is to experience estrangement to such a degree that it almost becomes tranquility.” — Eugene Thacker, from “On Pessimism”

in “Infinite Resignation”

• “I feel so lonely, like childhood again.” - plainwater: essays and poetry