— Anaïs Nin, from “The Four-Chambered Heart,” originally published c. 1950

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1947-1955

Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

— Risto Ahti, tr. by Herbert Lomas, from Contemporary Finnish Poetry: “Genie,”

— Virginia Woolf, Orlando.

Sex , lies, and videotape (1989)

[ID: I must be alone. What I accomplished was only the result of being alone. END ID]

Breathless (1960), dir. Jean-Luc Godard

— Ocean Vuong, from Night Sky with Exit Wounds; My Father Writes From Prison.

Albert Camus, The Fall

— Albert Camus, from Youthful Writings; “Intuitions,” wr. c. 1932

Sylvia Plath, aged 26, from "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath" (dated October 13, 1959)

— Christa Wolf, tr. by Jan van Heurck, from “Cassandra: A Novel & Four Essays,”

L. V., excerpts from a past life

— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963