“My homeland is in your eyes, my duty on your lips. Ask anything of me, except to leave you.”

- Gabriel Zaid, from "Circe" as featured in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths

“I’m a master of speaking silently, all my life I’ve spoken silently and I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One

Movie: Kapurush

Director: Satyajit Ray

“I have read your poems with my door locked late at night and I have read them on the seashore where I could look all round me and see no more sign of human life than the ships out at sea: and here I often found myself waking up from a reverie with the book open before me. I love all poetry, and high generous thoughts make the tears rush to my eyes, but sometimes a word or a phrase of yours takes me away from the world around me and places me in an ideal land surrounded by realities more than any poem I ever read.”

Bram Stoker, from a letter to Walt Whitman written c. February 1872

“You,” he said, “are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ilya Kaminsky, from "A Soul's Noise," Western Humanities Review (vol. 67, no. 2, Summer 2013)

Sara Teasdale, from “After Love”

I shall kiss you so much that they will mistake my mouth for yours.

— Unknown

For the love of a rose, the gardener becomes the slave of a thousand thorns.

—Turkish Proverb

My bones spell your name as suffocation.

I collect the words you say to me and wear them on a string around my neck, close to the pulse in my throat, the thump of my heart.

Emily Dickinson’s handwritten draft of “Wild Nights”

but this body is home, my childhood is buried here, my sleep rises and sets inside, desire crested and wore itself thin between these bones - I live here.

- Lisel Mueller, from "A Nude by Edward Hopper," Poetry (July 1967)

Every flaw I love in you except your absence.

—Mahmoud Darwish