"My eyes close. I am here and not here. A waking nap? A flight to the end of the galaxy and perhaps a couple of billion light-years beyond?"
— Vikram Seth
"She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her."
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
"Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones."
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones."
— Jeffrey McDaniel, from “The Archipelago of Kisses”
"[“Oh, my darlings, I’m sorry we don’t have time to say good-by properly. You see, we have to—”] But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone."
— Madeleine L’Engle, from A Wrinkle in Time
"You think you can get rid of things, and people too — leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been."
— Margaret Atwood
— Jane Hirshfield, from “Not Moving Even One Step”
"I didn’t even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me."
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me."
— Louise Glück, from “Trillium”
A boomerang lover — one that seems to disappear when you toss it away, with a mind that wants nothing more to do with it, until you’re suddenly hit with a visual speck of something familiar. And before you can react, its blunt force cracks your ribs and falls to the ground waiting to be thrown again
