HONEY

"I heard about a man and a woman who lived in Petrograd in 1917. These two were so in love with each other that they didn’t even notice the Revolution."

Boris Pasternak, unknown

"The blood flood is the flood of love, / The absolute sacrifice. / It means: no more idols but me, / Me and you."

Sylvia Plath, “The Munich Mannequins”

"Now I see that love is selfish. It makes you a country of two. At war with the rest of the world.”

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

"Without you, life is entirely feasible but hateful."

Katie Ward, Girl Reading

Elisabeth Hewer, “Dove Hands”

“I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.”  

John Keats, letter to Fanny Brawne

“I love you with a love that reaches you on the other shore. That dark, unknown shore where, in order to follow you, my love stumbles forth blindly, bleeding, but always holding you tight.”

Dulce María Loynaz, “Poem XCI”

Lorde, “The Louvre”

“I really like the idea of love as a violent act—not to the person that you love, but against the world. To say to somebody, ‘I love you; by extension, I hate all other things.”

Hozier, from an interview

“O I willingly stake all for you, / O let me be lost if it must be so! / O you and I! what is it to us what the rest / do or think? / What is all else to us? only that we enjoy / each other and exhaust each other if / it must be so”

Walt Whitman, “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers”

Franz Kafka, The Castle

Geoffrey Hill, from Odi Barbare