Some Days Progress Feels As Small As A Single Breath Drawn In Darkness - Trembling, Uncertain, Barely

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Margaret Llewyn Davis, featured in The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf

Why does it feel so impossible to let you go?

I broke in places no one could see, and smiled like nothing ever cracked.

Louise Glück, from Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems; "A Foreshortened Journey,"

If my poetry & prose don’t feel like this song; I won’t write them. ( I )

why are you sitting there so silently, / like someone mute, eating your heart,

from Homer's The Odyssey (tr. Emily Wilson)