Oh the sadness, leaving its own banks to establish other countries!
— Édouard Glissant, from The Collected Poems Of Édouard Glissant (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005)
How is it possible, when there are so many people in the world, for a life to be so shockingly solitary?
Maggie O'Farrell, from Instructions for a Heatwave (Headline Book Publishing, 2013)
For me it's essential to reject death,
Even though my legends die.
I am searching in the rubble for light, for new poetry.
Oh, did I realise before today
That letters in the dictionary, my love, are stupid?
How do all these words live?
How do they increase? How grow up?
We still nourish them with memories' tears,
With metaphors - and sugar!
So be it.
— Mahmoud Darwish, from "The Rose in the Dictionary," The Music of Human Flesh (Heinemann Educational Books, 1980)
And, of the voices that stray far from me, which one will be able to turn your journey and mine into a march of sleepless sunflowers? But no other good or other evil do they know than a lake of blue or gray, your eyes from an avenue’s shadow.
— Vittorio Sereni, from "To Youth," The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni: A Bilingual Edition (University Of Chicago Press, 2006)
How can one disguise the simple fact that the entire world is somewhat sad and lonely?
— Clarice Lispector, from The Hour of the Star (New Directions, 1992)
Nothing pains me besides having felt pain.
Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics, 2022; first published 1982)
on my desk, fictional characters practice missing dialogue. i sit here as if at the root of an old disturbance, forcing air into my memory cells to keep them alive,
— Maja Haderlap, from "piran," Distant Transit (Archipelago Books, 2022)
But what are my words? Storm-twisted forests facing north, craggy rocks against day's harrowing fire.
Olav H. Hauge, from "Singing again," Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 1990)
Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed!
Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics, 2022; first published 1982)
Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics, 2022; first published 1982)
I tried not to think about it as I went about my days, and mostly I succeeded. But occasionally the memories still found their way in, through a sound I heard, a word someone uttered, or a smell I caught in the street.
—Tan Twan Eng, from The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon, 2011)
Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift towards the morning light of remembrance.
Tan Twan Eng, from The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon, 2011)
I am no one in existence but myself, so –
Whom do I treat as foe and whom do I treat as friend?
Whom do I call to aid my heart, pierced by a penetrating
arrow,
When the archer is my eyelid, striking my heart without an
arrow?
Ibn 'Arabi, from "Treatise of Unification," The Universal Tree and the Four Birds (Anqa Publishing, 2006)
After looking at the world I live in, I have returned, with greater
anxiety, to words, to writing and to reading. Because in words resides a mysterious
halo that nourishes me. Because words distance us from destruction, from death.
They make us into others, within our own human wretchedness.
Mónica Nepote, from Sin Puertas Visibles: an Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003)
I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.
[...]
Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?
Ada Limon, from "The Hurting Kind," The Hurting Kind: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022)