two from stephen dunn

"I don't trust people until I know what they love. If they cannot admit to what they love, or in fact love nothing, I cannot take even their smartest criticisms seriously."

"Lovers are unreliable witnesses, which is why reliability is not always to be desired."

- Stephen Dunn

"The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is - it must be something you cannot possibly do!"

- Henry Moore

to love another

"To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned. You just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your unbelief." - Anne Sexton

"One's relation to one's subject ceases to be merely emotional or esthetical, or even merely critical, and becomes problematical, practical, and responsible as well. Because it must. It is like marrying your sweetheart." - Wendell Berry

rilke in the afternoon

"And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

haunted with love

"All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad. This is possible in the realms of lofty death. ‘Ah! my friends,’ thought I, ‘how I will tend you, and wait upon you, and haunt you with my love." - George MacDonald, Phantastes