“her face [was] upturned exactly like a flower, a fresh, luminous flower, glinting faintly golden with the dew of the first light.”

— D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love

Girl Who Love Girls

“I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being.”

— Sylvia Plath, from The Journals of Sylvia Plath (Dial Press, 1982)

Toa Heftiba

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 

Virginia Bluebells in April, US Midwest

We’ll open the veins of literature itself.

— Amanda Berenguer, Contemporary Uruguayan Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, transl by Ronald Haladyna, (2010)

La lettura è,

come l'amore,

un modo di essere.

Daniel Pennac

“So delicate it is almost barbaric, / almost violent.”

— Caitlyn Siehl, Crybaby, “Golden”

“Take me back to the evergreen trees; to the sunlight through the leaves, the bending ferns and fronds. The pitter of rain, the smooth rocks sleeping under moss. Take me back to the life I knew before this body.”

— Schuyler Peck, Bed of Moss

"For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and unremitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. We make it all so easy, any child in school can understand it – water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can’t live without it. But I don’t understand it. I cannot fathom its power." — Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Morning fog on the river

Photographer: Mehmet Onelge  

Natalie Clifford Barney, about Renée Vivien, after they met for the first time and Renée recited a poem for her, from A Perilous Advantage

I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the burdocks rustle in the ravine and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops I compose happy verses about life's decay, decay and beauty. I come back. The fluffy cat licks my palm, purrs so sweetly and the fire flares bright on the saw-mill turret by the lake. Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof occasionally breaks the silence. If you knock on my door I may not even hear.

—Anna Akhmatova