They Had Guessed, As Always Happens Between Lovers, Everything Of Any Importance About Each Other In

the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed.

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

FOR RENT: / an empty sky

- Agata Tuszyńska, Classified Ads tr. Regina Grol

There is a solitude in this world

I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

- Ada Limón, Drowning Creek

Someone was and was here and then suddenly disappeared and is stubbornly gone.

Wisława Szymborska, A Cat in an Empty Apartment tr. Regina Grol

Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making it out of ourselves

Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now 

“Then when G-d asks [Cain], ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ he arrogantly responds, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ In essence, the entire Bible is written as an affirmative response to this question.”

— Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy (via levoneh)

“Dionysus is a god who takes human form, a powerful male who looks soft and feminine, a native of Thebes who dresses as a foreigner. His parentage is mixed between divine and human; he is and is not a citizen of Thebes; his power has both feminine and masculine aspects. He does not merely cross boundaries, he blurs and confounds them, makes nonsense of the lines between Greek and foreign, between female and male, between powerful and weak, between savage and civilized. He is the god of both tragedy and comedy, and in his presence the distinction between them falls away, as both comedy and tragedy…”

— Paul Woodruff, The Bacchae (Translated and Annotated) 

Much has been said and written about the ‘haiku moment’ - that it blurs the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘self’ and ‘other’; that in it the perception of the essential and accidental, of the beautiful and the ugly, disappears; that it reflects things are they are in themselves.

- Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

I pray as if you existed.

Maria Bigoszewska, tr Regina Grol