The Only Dream Worth Having, I Told Her, Is To Dream That You Will Live While You're Alive And Die Only

You never refuse. You simply don't speak.

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

The light is nervous and quiet -

Urszula M. Benka, To the Last Man on Earth, In the Hour of His Death tr. Regina Grol

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

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

How I did waste and exhaust my heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

From the Wikipedia page about the Fermi Paradox: Given the high scientific probability for alien existence, why can we find no evidence of their existence whatsoever?

i) robert browning / eurydice to orpheus (1864) ii) w.a. mozart / “parto, parto” (la clemenza di tito, 1791) iii) jessica waldoff / recognition in mozart’s operas (2006) iv) c.w. gluck / orfeo ed euridice (1762) v) catherine maxwell / the female sublime from milton to swinburne: bearing blindness (2001) vi) gerald griffin / the collegians (1829) film stills from portrait de la jeune fille en feu (sciamma, 2019)

Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Someone was and was here and then suddenly disappeared and is stubbornly gone.

Wisława Szymborska, A Cat in an Empty Apartment tr. Regina Grol

You're the muscle / I cut from the bone and still the bone / remembers, still it wants (so much it wants)

Ada Limón, In A Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me

Death wanted to be this beautiful but we buried it

Garous Abdolmalekian, Sea tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey