ughpoems

[ughpoems]

“I cannot write about Damascus, without the jasmine climbing on my fingers. I cannot say Her name, without my mouth getting overcrowded with apricot drink, blackberries and quince.”

— Nizar Qabbani

[ughpoems]

“She floated in an unreal innocence….”

— Patrick Chamoiseau, tr. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov, Texaco (via niimph)

[ughpoems]

“You—you strange—you almost unearthly thing!—I love you as my own flesh.”

— Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (via soracities)

[ughpoems]

“You and I know each other in our bones,”

— Kurt Vonnegut, from a letter to Nanny Vonnegut wr. c. January 1973

[ughpoems]

“What settles is powdered like the morning after an evening’s unexpected snow when one looks out to find a nothingness that’s there: the street, the car, the yard having vanished beneath a pale quiet, falling. And across, where the park once was, lone footprints appear even lonelier as they trek away, searching for some lost yesteryear, a dear friend missed.”

— Greg Sellers, from working title “A Pale Quiet, Falling,” poem-in-progress, 6 February 2021

[ughpoems]

—now bounded, now immeasurable, it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt of “Evening [Der Abend]”, from The Book of Pictures, trans. by Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Source—(…) bald begrenzt und bald begreifend, abwechselnd Stein in dir wird und Gestirn.

(via antigonick)

[ughpoems]

Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to his wife Véra (1924), Letters to Véra (ed. Brian Boyd & trans. Olga Voronin)

[Text ID: “I know that I am a very boring and unpleasant man, drowned in literature…But I love you.”]

[ughpoems]

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide.”

— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

[ughpoems]

“Because we both loved the color of October, soaked in wine,”

— Elizabeth Cohen, from Circe’s Lament; “I Put A Spell on You Version 2.0,”

[ughpoems]

“Still, love is the impulse from which poetry springs. Even dark poems. Especially dark poems. To know the worst and write in spite of that, that must be love.”

— Lisel Mueller, from The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, eds. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, & David Weiss (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995)  (via memoryslandscape)

[ughpoems]

“And because I am so full of longing for you at the moment I am going to end this letter because of the pain I have at knowing that [being together] simply cannot be. I send you my love, a dozen sweet kisses, hug you tenderly in my heart”

— Marie Bader (1886-1942), in a letter to Ernst Löwy (1880-1943) Karlín, 14/6/1941 in: “Life and Love in Nazi Prague. Letters from an Occupied City. Marie Bader”, translated by Kate Ottevange

[ughpoems]

“Today I wanted to paint nakedness —”

— Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1886, in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), [Canyon, Texas] • [July 1, 1917] in: ”My Faraway One. Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Volume 1, 1915–1933″

[ughpoems]

“Oh how I would love to see you and speak to you now. I feel as if I should be with you at this moment. To know that I can’t be yours depresses me terribly and I am very upset by it.”

— Marie Bader (1886-1942), in a letter to Ernst Löwy (1880-1943) Karlín, 17/6/1941 in: “Life and Love in Nazi Prague. Letters from an Occupied City. Marie Bader”, translated by Kate Ottevange

[ughpoems]

“And I wish you were not so far away—and would take me out into the night—way out there in the dark blueness—and that the day would never come—or would I like to see the dawn with you—Night seems to mean that I could be close to you—feel your nearness— That if the day came and we were out there—even in the emptiness—and alone — we would be farther apart—would have to be. Goodnight.”

— Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1886, in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), [Canyon, Texas] • [July 1, 1917] in: ”My Faraway One. Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Volume 1, 1915–1933″

[ughpoems]

“I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”

— Albert Camus

[ughpoems]

“She is passion embodied, a flower of melodrama in eternal bloom.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

[ughpoems]

“(What was ‘It interested me’ supposed to mean? A book either knocks you down or raises you up. Otherwise, why pay money for it?)”

— Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years (trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh)