Aren't we most human when crying; and if we are most human, then aren't we approaching a condition beyond what is human? I think the angels must look something like this, like somebody weeping—only there this expression is seen as one of great beauty...
If someone asked me “What are the signs of love?” I would have said without hesitation, It’s the familiarity and the removal of cost, and the embarrassment removed between you two, and see yourself acting in your nature without trying to be something else so he likes you...
Grief treats us well when these parts of people that we've gotten to enjoy greet us warmly. That's the real gift, to say I am not just one person, I am multiple versions of a person & some of those versions of myself have been loved immensely by people who were so incredible.
I believe in the power of creating small joys, instead of waiting for a big one to arrive miraculously in your life. I made a list of these joys so I can refer to it when I’m deeper in the fog, like a menu to order from. 100 joys.
To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are. It’s a story you almost by definition, just can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.
Anthony Bourdain
There’s a legend about a Chinese painter who was asked by the emperor to paint a landscape so pristine that the emperor can enter it. He didn’t do a good job, so the emperor was preparing to assassinate him. But because it was his painting, legend goes, he stepped inside and...
it’s like this;
say there’s a whole room of people and you’re somewhere in the middle of
them all.
i walk in and i see you, but you don’t suddenly become the only person in
the room. god no. you become the room. you are the room.
Salma Deera
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life… it’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.
You are making breakfast in every dream that I have of you. You are in the kitchen, your soft middle pressed up against the cold marble countertops. I think for a brief second that I am dreaming inside of my dream, that I had to make you up twice, just to get it right.
You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can't go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days.
I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, I know me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?
Elizabeth McCracken
we peer into the future and see you happy and hope it is a sign that we
will be happy too, something to cling to, happiness
the least and best of human attainments
Frank O’Hara
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
Billy Collins
You’ve brought such profound depth to the language of love in food. It was not lost on me, the love letter to your mother in your relationship with food. You exquisitely express how profound that connection is, as an expression of love that’s harder to express in other ways.
I did think, let's go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn't.
Mary Oliver
Will I cherish you, adore you, make way for you, make myself better for you, look at you and always see you, tell you the truth? And if love is not those things then what things?
Jeanette Winterson
The next time you have a snack like a tangerine— Peeling the tangerine and smelling it, and tasting it, you can be very happy. You can taste the sweetness of the sun.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The clearest thing I remember came at the end of a long self-critical talk about his failures of the heart, the choosing of people who wouldn’t love back. “At least I picked the right friend,” he said, waving an arm that took me in and the room and all our laughter.
Paul Monette
And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—
Louise Glück
The truest loves of our lives are not always romantic. The winter makes us honest. It helps us remember.
Sanna Wanni
*
Q: your most memorable place with Dino?
Hoshi: snowy winter, in front of a restaurant
*
"hoshi hyung just stayed there by my side without saying anything."
Grief [is] a wound that opens you but also shows you the miracles of what is inside you. Rather than try to escape my griefs, I’m trying to recognize them as a wildness I can submerge myself in, to be washed clean by the very thing that aches me so deeply.
Natalie Diaz
Even now it is hard to admit how love knocked me over. I had lived a life protected from all surprise, now suddenly I was a wheel running downhill. I was outside my own language and customs.
Anne Carson
In the midst of my doubts, sufferings, anxieties, revolts and anger, only one thing remains firm: my love for you and the unshakeable feeling that nothing can separate me from you. Remember our old storms. Even the shadow is sweet to me if I know you in the sun.
Maria Casarès
I’m beginning to recognise that real happiness isn’t something large and looming on the horizon ahead but something small, numerous and already here. The smile of someone you love. A decent breakfast. The warm sunset. Your little everyday joys all lined up in a row.
Beau Taplin
I’m not telling you to make the world better I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.
Joan Didion
I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen.
Lemony Snicket
They say a poet
can never write a purely happy poem about a dog
greeting the sun and what it has done to rain.
I don’t know about that.
Analicia Sotelo
What I am giving you is nothing that belongs to me. It is just yourself, you running through me throwing off sparks, your eyes blazing with fear, with hope. All I do is breathe very gently on your night embers and handfuls of stars fly out.
Hélène Cixous
The longer I live, the more I learn that love is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Steadfast work. Life-saving work when life and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back.
James Baldwin
vanished, saving himself.
I always loved that little allegory as an artist. Even when it is not enough for others, if it is enough for you, you can live inside it.
Ocean Vuong, from an interview with Zoë Hitzig in Prac Crit
But my first experience of romance, the first love that propelled me into a world beyond the familiar, was this friendship. The kind of wild closeness I had with my best friend still seems to be like the thing toward which romance strives and of which it often falls short.
May you always know pain as temporary and laughter better.
May the universe bless you with the perseverance to try harder.
May you build a kinder history than the ruins that you were given.
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.
Milan Kundera
[Love] must be something like that: something ineffable that comes from outside and fills us; something that changes the way we see what we see; something that allows us to see what we don’t.
Andre Dubus
“I know my life’s meaningful because” --and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued-- “because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.
Hanya Yanagihara
the final sour cherry we kept politely
pushing onto each other’s plate, saying,
No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours.
How I finally put an end to it, plucked it
and stuck it in my mouth. [...]
How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.
how he wanted to move people through music, have them feel what he felt when he loved something fiercely, that deep and silent feeling of having no room left in your body for anything else but this, this, this.
Devin Kelly
Do you know what I want of life?
That I can be with you, you, all of you, and if life repeated a thousand times, still you, you, and again, you.
Forugh Farrokhzad, On Loving (translated by Sholeh Wolpé)
You know, love doesn’t mean ‘I never want you to change’. But I don’t think it means ‘I don’t care if you change’ either. So I suppose it might mean, ‘I believe that you’ll always be the person I adore’. A declaration of faith.
Nio Nakatani, やがて君になる (Bloom into You)
I love to dance with you. I have always thought your long slim limbs were meant for dancing, but not for being guided by some stupid man who was probably scared of your height. I should be just the right height for you shouldn’t I my sweet.
Hilda Matheson
This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. They take each other’s hands, hold as tight as they can, & when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.
Brandon Taylor
In Chinese, Love is '爱' (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future. If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.
Xiaolu Guo
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
Joy Harjo
*
The kettle alone knows the good he does,
Here in the kitchen, loving the world,
Steadfastly loving
See how easy it is, he whistles
Penelope Shuttle
One day I shall return to your side
Please take care of your health and await my return
I will accompany you to spend all of your tomorrows
Mom’s Missed Call by Jun, The 8
*
The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Ocean Vuong
The ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them...
I dream, now, of a normal life with you. A life where breakfast lasts until the sun goes down, until I have finished gazing at you from across the table, flour dried to your forehead like a kiss.
Caitlin Siehl
I didn't know then --
that this was love. That this was community. That this
was about a greater good. If the road is long, it
doesn't matter what you weigh -- I will carry you.
Jacqueline Woodson
The heart almost buckles, seeing how everything should go on, and that this mundane everything, made up of such small and ordinary parts, is exactly what one strives to keep.
Aracelis Girmay
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for
good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the
guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and
good.
And all that we suffered through having
existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.
Donald Justice
My longing
was ruby-colored. I wore it
around my neck, and everything
was drunkenness and dance, every day
a kind of drowning—
Zeina Hashem Beck / Rothko / Anne Carson
I know that the real things in life, things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love — all love — love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river...
Jeanette Winterson
That music has been playing
Since you were born.
You must be mad to resist it.
Always the beloved
Surrounds us.
Eager to dance.
All we have to do is ask.
Gregory Orr
calling you in from the kitchen where you are undoubtedly making dinner too spicy, but when
you hold the spoon to my lips and ask if it's ready
I'll say it is, always, but never, there is never enough.
Tracy Brimhall
Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
Jeanette Winterson
I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,
I love you,
How incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop...
Herman Hesse
*
MINGYU: I even feel a little sad that our dream came true.
Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives; some moments teach one the price of the human connection.
James Baldwin
Jun asked "what is friendship?" so I explained with gestures, "it's the feeling that we feel right now."
(tr. tinkswonu)
*
Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?
Hanya Yanagihara
Perhaps I never cared enough
about these earthly things, about desire.
The sliding of the seasons, coming and going,
youth and age. Sailing away sounds good to me.
Linda Gregg
I love you, because when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone, you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.
Albert Camus
As a gift he once welded me the single most beautiful object I own. The box, he explained to me, is the love. It is the container that can hold all the brokenness, and make it beautiful. Especially when you hold it up to the light.
Maggie Nelson
Woozi: Circles, this song is what i really want to say to the members most deeply(from heart), what i really wanted to say to Wonwoo, really wanted to say to myself, want to say to everyone & to carats.
when everyone was saying "don't cry"
kyeom said "cry to ur hearts content"😭
Your loneliness is precious to you, I know. Does it disturb you to know you are dear to me? Do not let it. It is such a quiet feeling.
Katherine Mansfield
She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away. At least I know what love looks like, I told myself. That's something. No one had ever looked at me like that, but I'd be able to recognize it if they ever did.
Gail Honeyman
We are alive. And now the work is to be gentler with ourselves and with the world. I want such a sweet life for you. I want the fierceness of attention, of the light coming over the hill. Of love —
Molly McCully Brown
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.
Warsan Shire
S.COUPS: Won’t let them break your heart.