Serafín Martínez del Rincón y Trives, attributed (Spanish, 1840-1892)
A young musician, n.d.
Serafín Martínez del Rincón y Trives, attributed (Spanish, 1840-1892)
A young musician, n.d.
Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.
Anne Sexton, quoted in ‘Anne Sexton: A Biography’ by Diane Wood Middlebrook
The most brilliant part of you exists to haunt me:
Caitlin Bailey, Solve for Desire; from ‘Pigeons’
All that was left was that intense, intoxicating, saturating love.
Philip Pullman, from ‘The Secret Commonwealth’
[…] you’re only a wish, a possibility, a phantom.
Margaret Atwood, from ‘The Testaments’
I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my – experience – I have never known anyone like you.
Tennessee Williams, from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
You—you strange, you almost unearthly thing!—I love as my own flesh.
Charlotte Brontë, from ‘Jane Eyre’
Oh how it courses all through my veins when by accident my finger touches hers or when our feet touch under the table. I pull back as though from fire and a mysterious force draws me on again—there is a fainting in all my senses.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, tr. David Constantine
I thought I was over this