All things do not pass. Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might. 

 Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Words

say everything,

I

love you

again,

then what

is emptiness

for. To

fill, fill.

— Robert Creeley

"All I ask," my mother said, "no matter the years

and the life we have, is that when you leave

you turn and wave." That was long ago.

I like to remember - I turn, I wave.

- William Stafford

"I am kneeling before the white wall

I write my name

upon the water. I see the hours

passing like clouds. There is no

bottom. Neither abyss.

At my feet shadow draws back.

Who am I? Do you not know me?"

— Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, from "Vigils," trans. William Carlos Williams

“my friends

who are always beautiful & heartbroken

look at me like they know 

I will die before them.

I think the life I have

is the life I want, but how can I be sure?” 

 —Hieu Minh Nguyen

My only advice for you is this. Go within yourself and probe the depths from which your life springs, and there at its source you'll find the answer to the question of whether you must write. Accept this answer, just as you hear it, without hesitation. It may be revealed that you are called to be an artist. Then take this lot upon you, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without asking for any external reward. For the creative artist must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself—and in nature, to which he is devoted.

Rainer Maria Rilke

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

If we’re lucky,
it’s always a terrible time
to die.


 —Erin Belieu

All My Joy All My Pain

My father no longer knows me. Not even

those sparks of consciousness

that cheered us not so long ago.

He lies submerged in darkness, sleeps, dozes,

as if he’d already taken leave.

There are still the brief moments, though,

when his real face is revealed.

Adam Zagajewski 

 

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
 
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Tell me where it hurts, she’d say.
Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where.
But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”                          
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin 

“There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.”
 
― James Wright