“Of All Sad Words Of Tongue Or Pen, The Saddest Are These, ‘It Might Have Been.’”

“My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.”

John Keats Love Letter To Fanny Brawne – 13 October 1819

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours

Louise Glück, From Descending Figure; “The Garden”

Vladimir Nabokov, from Letters to Véra

“Life is that which must overcome itself again and again.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is madness to hate all roses because you got scratched with one thorn.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupére 

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.”

—

Anton Chekhov (b. 29 January 1860)

Marguerite Duras, from The Lover

Text ID: to devour and be devoured,

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”

—The Picture of Dorian Gray - O. Wilde

Edith Sitwell, Fire of the Mind: The Complete Anthology of Edith Sitwell