Yes, I was infatuated with you; I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath — July 1950 - July 1953
You came to the side of the bed and sat staring at me. Then you kissed me—I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end.
— Louise Glück, “Marathon,” The Triumph of Achilles
…real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.… By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within. By day no light is needed, and if you don’t know it is night you won’t light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness.
— C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.
— Richard Siken, Spork Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone
“Love is a matter of faith. Faith is a matter of risk. I couldn’t eliminate that risk. That’s what God did in the Garden of Eden. He loved His creature so much he didn’t eliminate the risk.”
“It’s an aberrant logic.”
“No, it’s the ultimate proof of respect. Love presupposes respect.”
“So you consider yourself like God?”
“To love is to accept being God.”
— Amélie Nothomb, Bluebeard
God could only be a fruit of our anemia: a tottering and rachitic image. He is mild, good, sublime, just. But who recognizes himself in that mixture of redolent of rose water, relegated to transcendence? A Being without duplicity lacks depth, lacks mystery; He hides nothing. Only impurity is a sign of reality. And if the saints are not completely stripped of interest, it is because their sublimity is tinged with the novelistic, their eternity lends itself to biography; their lives indicate that they have left the world for a genre capable of captivating us from time to time….
Because he overflows with life, the Devil has no altar: man recognizes himself too readily in him to worship him; he detests him for good reason; he repudiates himself, and maintains the indigent attributes of God. But the Devil never complains and never aspires to found a religion: are we not here to safeguard him from inanition and oblivion?
— Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay
