Apparently Marshall McLuhan (who was a Catholic convert) received intellectual guidance from the Blessed Virgin Mary.
— Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger
Souls fear the human body. They say that angels are forced to sing in order to lure the soul into flesh.
— Hector Meinhof, Three Nails, Four Wounds
But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home
To a leaky castle across the sea, –
To lie awake in linen smelling of lavender,
And hear the nightingale, and long for me.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Short Story
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Those depressing nocturnal haunts. All night, I listen to their phantom sounds. Turning, violently, inside my head.”
— Helaena C Moon
“It is terrifying. And yet, you knew what you were getting into. You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close.”
— Caleb Azumah Nelson, from Open Water
— Anaïs Nin, in a diary entry written c. November 1932 featured in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. I: 1931-1934
“I hated him because I could not remain detached, could not remain standing at the top of the stairs watching him depart. I felt myself going down with him, within him, because his pain and flight were so familiar to me. I descended with him, and lost myself, passed into him, became one with him like his shadow.”
—- Anaïs Nin, Winter of Artifice
“I struggle with myself, with the meaning to put into it all, with my desire to give and to hold, to keep and to lose, to live and to die. I want to remember all the time why I should want to live. I am all pain and no memory. Inside of my body there are fires, there are bruises, the flesh is in pain.”
— Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry wr. c. August 1937, featured in “Diaries,”— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1944–1947
— Anthony Oliveira, Dayspring
Octavio Paz, A Tale of Two Gardens
— Rebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty; from ‘A Guide to Love in Icelandic’
— Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet
“I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful.”
— Sylvia Plath, from “Three Women,” Winter Trees
“I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals
I liked him too much―way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did.
Sylvia Plath
“I remember a white, cold wing And the great swan, with its terrible look, Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river. There is a snake in swans.”— Sylvia Plath, from “Elm.”
Souls, rolled in the doom noise of the sea.
— Sylvia Plath
“The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.”
— Sylvia Plath, Ariel
“During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.”
– Edgar Allan Poe, from “Berenice,” Poetry and Tales
hexafu 