It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
— John Updike, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
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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
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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
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…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
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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
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“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