x"How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?"
—
Warsan Shire
x"I knew when I said
I love you
that I was inventing a new alphabet
for a city where no one could read
that I was saying my poems
in an empty theater
and pouring my wine
for those who could not
taste it."
—
Nizar Qabbani
x
Love Is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
x"You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free."
—
Thich Nhat Hanh
x"Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love."
—
Friedrich Nietzsche
x"I thought: please don’t grow
familiar. I think I said it out loud:
Please don’t let me love you
that horrible way."
—
Olena Kalytiak Davis, excerpt from “All the Natural Movements of the Soul”
x"I say this is a wild dream— but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon’s soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the morning continuing where we left off; resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich, varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and a tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before— consciously, willfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience."
—
Henry Miller, in a letter to Anaïs Nin dated August 14, 1932
x"It’s this love of you
that grows in me
malignant."
—
Jack Gilbert, from “It May Be No One Should Be Opened”
x"Passion gives me moments of wholeness."
—
Anaïs Nin
x"The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead."
—
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
x"I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything."
—
Carol Ann Duffy, from “Name”
x"I go where I love and where I am loved,
into the snow; I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity."
—
H.D., from the “The Flowering of the Rod”
