Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War; “Grace”

[Text ID: I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.]

“today, somebody said you look so happy it’s almost like you have nothing inside of you.”

— Jennifer Maritza McCauley, “What Joy” from Queen Mob’s Tea House

To turn now to the more material media through which this story moves, it so happened that the very next morning brought round a circumstance which, slight in itself, took up a relevant and important position between the past and the future of the persons herein concerned.

— Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies

Hermes Standing Over the Slain Argus by Paul Edme Le Rat (1881)

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–1919)

“‘My books only gave me pain’, Charlotte Brontë said. Today I agree. Very heavy dull and damp. Brain with no, I can’t think of the word — yes, wilts. Now, in my nightgown, to walk on the marshes.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. September 1940

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask.

David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair; from 'Little Expressionless Animals'

— Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“My grief will cut off all of my hair. My grief will burn my house down. My grief will give birth to chaos. My grief will stop at nothing […]”

— Lydia Havens, from “September & Nothing Else,” Survive Like Water

“In the last battle, all that remains are impressions: Memories played out in our age of innocence, stardust for those eleven kinds of loneliness.”

— Dieu Dinh, Tender Cracks; “Untitled Titles”

To have a heart like this / is to be made of midnight. / I have been waiting for this heart to fade or at least to kneel. The heart is not inside us but we are inside it.

Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything; “Marfa, Texas”

“Four years after he left, he is still spoon-feeding my heart back into my quivering mouth.”

— Franny Choi, from “My Lovers,” Floating, Brilliant, Gone

“A disappearing act never meant to appear in the first place”

— Dena Igusti, from “The Story Never Told,” published in Thread

“That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”

—

R.F. Kuang, Babel

“That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”

—

R.F. Kuang, Babel

““Give me a kiss, sweetheart, before spring passes us by,””

— Hatim Al Kinani, tr. & ed. Adil Babikir, Modern Sudanese Poetry: An Anthology; “Skies”