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"I don’t know if love’s a feeling. Sometimes I think it’s a matter of seeing. Seeing you.”

— Marguerite Duras, Emily L.

“The moment’s enormous, / the world is now small. / I am lost in your eyes, / and lost, I see you / lost in my eyes.”

— Octavio Paz, “Pillars”

“What 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 seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

— Octavio Paz, “Letter of testimony”

“You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and 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.”

— Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

“A wave of emotion came over me, so strong I didn’t recognize it. It might have been grief. It might have been relief. I think it was recognition.”

— Kelly Link, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” 

“We sometimes recognise each other. By a certain way of looking, by a way of shaking hands, we recognise each other and call this love.”

— Clarice Lispector, “The Egg and the Chicken”

— Fiona Apple, “Cosmonauts”

“What’s love if not a waiting to be seen?”

— Camille Norton, “Night Swimming”

“It was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyes–”

— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in the collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate.” 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.”

— Simone Weil, “School Studies”

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its 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.”

— Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“And I love. / And have no need of phrases. / My need / is that we gaze into each other.”

— Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Babii Yar”

— La Pointe Courte (1956), dir. Agnès Varda

“Even 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.”

— David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary

“Their love, like all real love affairs, begins as recognition. They see each other.”

— Vicky Kreips, on Phantom Thread (x)

“ANNA: 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? 

MABEL: This house. [VOICE GLITCHES SLIGHTLY] The kingdom beyond the firmament. I saw you. I saw you. I saw you.”

— Mabel Martin & Becca de la Rosa, Mabel: Episode 39

— Octavio Paz, “House of Glances”

“ “I’ve seen what you truly are,” said the Darkling, “and I’ve never turned away. I never will. Can he say the same?”

— Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.”

— Rilke, “Extinguish My Eyes”

“The 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 beauty—and if not beauty, meaning—in that brutal power.”

— Ocean Vuong, in an interview (x)

“Let 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.”

— Solmaz Sharif, “Look”

— Jenny Slate on twitter

“And let me purify myself /  —to look at you,  / to look at you (I said)”

— William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“The 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.”

— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“When I drown my eyes in your eyes, / I glimpse the deepest dawning / and see the ancient times; / I see what I do not comprehend / and feel the universe flowing / between your eyes and mine.”

— Adonis, “Between Your Eyes and Mine”

“Herakles’ gaze on him was like a gold tongue. Magma rising.”

— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“[Berger] turns [the book] over in his hands in delighted surprise. “That is a drawing by Melina,” he exclaims, surveying the flowers with spindly stems on the cover, “my granddaughter.” 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 – Katya, Jacob and Yves – and five grandchildren.) He props it next to us and we look at her, as if she had joined us for lunch. “If you ask me who I am,” Berger says, “I’d like to see myself through her eyes, in the way she looks at me.” “

— John Berger on his granddaughter Melina (x)

“We met—in our mutual gaze—in between a third place I’d not yet been.”

— Marie Howe, “The Affliction”

“I won’t hide it: I’m so unused to being – well, understood, perhaps, – 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 – you’ll rub off their marvellous pollen at the touch of a word …You are lovely.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra

“We see each other through the glass. We witness each other. That’s something, to be seen by another human, to be seen over all the years. That’s something, too. Love plus time. Love that’s movable, invisible as a liquid or gas, love that finds a way in. Love that leaks.”

— Samantha Hunt, “A Love Story”

“Lie 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.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies

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