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Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Marta Hegemann ca. 1927, by August Sander

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Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910-1913

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–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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“(…) the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Sonnets (XLII) in “Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay”

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“As night arrives I stand on the steps and listen, the stars are swarming in the garden and I stand in darkness. Did you hear, a star fell with a clang! Don’t walk barefoot in the grass; my garden is full of shards.”

— Edith Södergran, from “The Stars,”  The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden (Milkweed Editions , 2014)

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“Don’t take away your memory. Leave it alone in my chest. A tremor of white cherry in punishing January. […] But leave your memory, leave it alone in my chest.”

— Federico García Lorca, from “Gacela of Love’s Memory,” The Tamarit Poems (Dedalus Press, 2007)

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“For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.”

— The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham (b. 25 January 1874)

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T.S. Eliot, from “East Coker”, Collected Poems, 1909-1962

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“Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

— John Keats, from a letter to Charles Brown; Sept. 28, 1820. (via memoryslandscape)

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Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”, Collected Poems, 1909-1962

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Divina Commedia - Inferno, Canto XXXII, Dante and Virgil before Lucifer Italian Manuscript; XIV Century

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“My life has begun to acquire again the remote and lonely quality it had when I was wandering about before—I seem to be the phantom in a world of people; or the only person in a world of phantoms—it’s all the same. I love you, my dear: your letters give me life. I can not yet swallow in my gorge the thought of night adventure. My life has withdrawn on a most high hill, within a wall. I no longer get depressed, as I did once, at being alone. I’m used to it now—there’s a strange aerial coldness about it. Once, I loathed myself at heart, because I felt I was a spineless sensualist: I saw myself, a worn out whore master at 30, a battered rake at 40, with small red gummy eyes. But I believe now I may become some frosty hermit: with thirsty cheeks and eyes. I weave dreams no more about affairs with living flesh; but very often now I have thought of the antique figures—not coldly, but with passionate warmth—Not as symbols, but as great actualities.  I want eternal life, eternal renewal, eternal love […] I want life to ebb and flow in me in a mighty rhythm of oblivion and ecstasy.” -Thomas Wolfe, in a letter to Aline Bernstein, from My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein ed. Suzanne Stutman

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“Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss. Now. Maybe now. Before.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses (cover page of a first edition, 708/1000)

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“and swirled justly souls of flower strike // the air in utterable coolness”

— E.E. Cummings, “i have found what you are like”