Em Walter

“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say”
― Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry