Above My Own Life On A Crippled Wing I Soar, Oh, I Soar

Does the earth fill the mouths of the dead to stop them from describing what they've seen?

Garous Abdolmalekian, Long Poem of Loneliness tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

Make much of me why don't you.

Matthea Harvery, Not So Much Miniature As Far Away

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and nessecary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world’s greatest benefactors),

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

the tenderness…. 

he had eyes like drenched violets,

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Still he looked; still he paused. It is these pauses that are our undoing.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Come back. Tell us what you’ve seen. Tell us you met a god so reckless, so lonely, it will love us all.

—Traci Brimhall, from “Late Novena,” Our Lady of Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012)

What fragments of her history live in my body?

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Detail - Angels “Ghent Altarpiece” finished 1432, Jan van Eyck.