Ilya Kaminsky, from "Dancing in Odessa"

It's June, the evenings touching our skins like plush, milkweed sweetening the sticky air which pulses with moths, their powdery wings and velvet tongues. In the dusk, nighthawks and the fluting voices from the pond, its edges webbed with spawn. Everything leans into the pulpy moon.

Margaret Atwood, the last day

I’m not kidding i think about this all the time

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go…

Rainer Maria Rilke, "entrance", the book of Images, trans. Edward Snow

Edna St. Vincent Millay, July 1911

Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive–it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?

Anaïs Nin, mirages: the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin (1939-1947)

im a romantic. n i’m passionate. and i care. i care, i care. 

And if you missed a day, there was always the next, and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter, the hills weren’t going anywhere, the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—

Louise Glück, Sunrise

“I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know — unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love. For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves.”

— James Kavanaugh