Quotidia

Winter is coming.

- George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones

Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon

- Leonard Cohen, “Dance Me to the End of Love”

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse.” 

—Hemingway

Start at either end of a sorrow

and walk towards its epicenter.

—Ryan Flaherty, “Start”

We are not the first bathtub contortionists, nipple biters, pelvis bruisers, sheet-rippers.

Et nos non inventimus ita. Discovery is not invention—the land is not the map, love.

—Heather Price, “Camera Obscura”

“In truth, the hardest things I’ve ever said—on the page or face-to-face—are ‘I love you’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m grateful.’ To say them straightforwardly, without wit or sarcasm. For the writer, I think, darkness is almost never as hard to express as light.”

—Rebecca McClanahan

My sister. on the other hand, looks up
at the stretched net overhead. She figures
an escape. Through that empty patch, she tells me,
pointing at the tiniest square of sky.

—Esther Lee, “The Real World Is Like This:”

Thought of you as my mountain top,
Thought of you as my peak.
Thought of you as everything,
I’ve had but couldn’t keep.

—The Velvet Underground, “Pale Blue Eyes”

I do not fear what comes after death. I fear what comes before.

—Amy Monticello, Ten Square Miles