Hi! I wanted to know if you have any excerpts about being "seen" mainly in a relationship with a lover/romantic interest, but it can extend to platonic as well(:
"I donāt know if loveās a feeling. Sometimes I think itās a matter of seeing. Seeing you.ā
ā Marguerite Duras, Emily L.
āThe momentās enormous, / the world is now small. / I am lost in your eyes, / and lost, I see you / lost in my eyes.ā
ā Octavio Paz,Ā āPillarsā
āWhat I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place. The way he watched me back there in the field, when we worked briefly, side by side, our arms brushing against each other as the plants racked themselves in a green blur before me, his eyes lingering, then flitting away when I caught them. I was seenāI who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe.ā
ā Ocean Vuong, On Earth Weāre Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
ā Octavio Paz,Ā āLetter of testimonyā
āYou look at me, from close up you look at me, closer andĀ closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence.ā
ā Julio CortĆ”zar, Hopscotch
āA wave of emotion came over me, so strong I didnāt recognize it. It might have been grief. It might have been relief. I think it was recognition.ā
ā Kelly Link, āCarnation, Lily, Lily, RoseāĀ
āWe sometimes recognise each other. By a certain way of looking, by a way of shaking hands, we recognise each other and call this love.ā
ā Clarice Lispector,Ā āThe Egg and the Chickenā
ā Fiona Apple,Ā āCosmonautsā
āWhatās love if not a waiting to be seen?ā
ā Camille Norton,Ā āNight Swimmingā
āIt was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyesāā
ā Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
āThe love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: āWhat are you going through?ā It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in the collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled āunfortunate.ā But as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark of affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.ā
ā Simone Weil, āSchool Studiesā
āEventually I confess to a friend some details about my weepingāits intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.ā
āĀ Maggie Nelson, Bluets
āAnd I love. / And have no need of phrases. / My need / is that we gaze into each other.ā
ā Yevgeny Yevtushenko,Ā āBabii Yarā
ā La Pointe Courte (1956), dir. AgnĆØs Varda
āEven when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.ā
ā David Levithan, The Loverās Dictionary
āTheir love, like all real love affairs, begins as recognition. They see each other.ā
ā Vicky Kreips, on Phantom Thread (x)
āANNA: I'd always rather know. It's the - [LAUGHS]. The sickness. Hang on. Let me - [FUMBLES WITH RECORDER] Okay. Mabel Martin, what do you see in the heart of the collapsing star?Ā
MABEL: This house. [VOICE GLITCHES SLIGHTLY] The kingdom beyond the firmament. I saw you. I saw you. I saw you.ā
ā Mabel Martin & Becca de la Rosa, Mabel: Episode 39
ā Octavio Paz,Ā āHouse of Glancesā
ā āIāve seen what you truly are,ā said the Darkling,Ā āand Iāve never turned away. I never will. Can he say the same?ā
ā Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm
āExtinguish my eyes, Iāll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, Iāll go on hearing you.ā
ā Rilke, āExtinguish My Eyesā
āThe gaze, human or animal, is a powerful thing. When we look at something, we decide to fill our entire existence, however briefly, with that very thing. To fill your whole world with a person, if only for a few seconds, is a potent act. And it can be a dangerous one. Sometimes we are not seen enough, and other times we are seen too thoroughly, we can be exposed, seen through, even devoured. Hunters examine their prey obsessively in order to kill it. The line between desire and elimination, to me, can be so small. But that is who we are. There must be some beautyāand if not beauty, meaningāin that brutal power.ā
ā Ocean Vuong, in an interview (x)
āLet it matter what we call a thing. Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds. Let me LOOK at you. Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.ā
ā Solmaz Sharif,Ā āLookā
āĀ Jenny Slate on twitter
āAnd let me purify myself / Ā āto look at you, Ā / to look at you (I said)ā
ā William Carlos Williams, Paterson
āThe power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.ā
ā Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
āWhen I drown my eyes in your eyes, /Ā I glimpse the deepest dawning /Ā and see the ancient times; /Ā I see what I do not comprehend /Ā and feel the universe flowing /Ā between your eyes and mine.ā
ā Adonis, āBetween Your Eyes and Mineā
āHeraklesā gaze on him was like a gold tongue. Magma rising.ā
ā Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
ā[Berger] turns [the book] over in his hands in delighted surprise. āThat is a drawing by Melina,ā he exclaims, surveying the flowers with spindly stems on the cover, āmy granddaughter.ā He gets up from the table and returns with an oil portrait, the size of a sheet of A4 paper. It is of an ageless face and yet Melina is only 13. (Berger has three children ā Katya, Jacob and Yves ā and five grandchildren.) He props it next to us and we look at her, as if she had joined us for lunch. āIf you ask me who I am,ā Berger says, āIād like to see myself through her eyes, in the way she looks at me.āĀ ā
ā John Berger on his granddaughter MelinaĀ (x)
āWe metāin our mutual gazeāin between a third place Iād not yet been.ā
ā Marie Howe,Ā āThe Afflictionā
āI wonāt hide it: Iām so unused to being ā well, understood, perhaps, ā so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting I thought: this is a joke, a masquerade trick ⦠But then ⦠And there are things that are hard to talk about ā youāll rub off their marvellous pollen at the touch of a word ā¦You are lovely.ā
ā Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife VĆ©ra
āWe see each other through the glass. We witness each other. Thatās something, to be seen by another human, to be seen over all the years. Thatās something, too. Love plus time. Love thatās movable, invisible as a liquid or gas, love that finds a way in. Love that leaks.ā
ā Samantha Hunt, āA Love Storyā
āLie beside me and let the seeing be the healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.ā
ā Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies
ā The Princess Diaries (2001), dir. Garry Marshall



















