Van Lear Rose

Solitude, an intoxicating sense of freedom,

“[S]he felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here;” and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere, so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman on the street, some man behind a counter–even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death … perhaps–perhaps.”

“Chilly January. She gave herself to the dark waves,”

“Somebody sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it’s all gone, the whole world falls apart.”

“You kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolour, the colours ran…”

“Dionysus was the god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love. But he was also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god, and all whom he loved, all who attended him, had to share his tragic fate.”

“I, abstract, adoring, distant And unsalvageable.”

“I like opening up the pomegranates, turning their brightness around in my fingers. I even like the Portuguese word for them–romã–the morning glimmer it has to it.”