Does The Earth Fill The Mouths Of The Dead To Stop Them From Describing What They've Seen?

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

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

but indirectly children know everything there is to know. They just don't know why.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty

There is a solitude in this world

I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

- Ada Limón, Drowning Creek

The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of the bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

Sometimes, there seems to be a halfway point between where you've been and everywhere else, and we were there.

Ada Limón, Oh Please, Let It Be Lightning

Roman “hologram” ring from 1st century CE. Gold and rock crystal with a sculpted  image of nobleman Carvilius Gemellus who died. young. The ring was discovered in 2000 from her mother’s tomb near Rome.

I have to say that is the most amazing Roman ring that I’ve ever seen.

Truth. What ferocity in your quest for it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing,

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

You never refuse. You simply don't speak.

Alicja Rybałko, A Prayer for the Forbidden Fruit tr. Regina Grol