“(we are not single; we are one)” (virginia woolf)

“why was she dancing? no reason. just alive, I guess” (george saunders)

“touch me this time / let me love what I cannot know” (w.s. merwin)

“and when I found you laughing under trees, / The quail began to trill and flute away, / As far away as hands that reach for hands; / But, when it sang, you kissed me out of sound.” (james wright) 

“what on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?” (tennessee williams)

“come back! even as a shadow, even as a dream!” (euripides)

“with every word I write I remember the void that makes me write what I couldn’t if I let you in.” (alejandra pizarnik)

“I am dying alone /  don’t wake me… / kiss me once again… / and sleep...” (saadi youssef)

Kathleen Woodword, Aging and its Discontents

“The longing to touch/be touched. I feel gratitude when I touch someone—as well as affection etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body—and that there are bodies in the world.”

Susan Sontag,  Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964 - 1980

“Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?”

Ocean Vuong, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’

“While the skin appears to be the matter which separates the body, it rather allows us to think of how the materialisation of bodies involves, not containment, but an affective opening out of bodies to other bodies, in the sense that the skin registers how bodies are touched by others.”

Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters

“There’s power in the touch of another person’s hand. We acknowledge it in little ways, all the time. There’s a reason human beings shake hands, hold hands, slap hands, bump hands. It comes from our very earliest memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color, deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes that first horror, that original state of terror? The touch of another person’s hands. Hands that wrap us in warmth, that hold us close. Hands that guide us to shelter, to comfort, to food. Hands that hold and touch and reassure us…”

Jim Butcher, Skin Game

“Touch me, /  remind me who I am.”