Perpendicular Lines Are Chekhovian; The Introduced Gun Goes Off. Parallel Lines Are Hitchcockian; The

of burning but unwasting fire

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

Ada Limón, It’s The Season I Often Mistake

There is a solitude in this world

I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

- Ada Limón, Drowning Creek

as if you could not enjoy love without pain.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

Thought and life are as the poles asunder.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I believe in ending sentences with a preposition in order to give the ideas a way out.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

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)