Verena

“maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —

as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking”
― Mary Oliver

“And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin
thread (since they lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one´s friends were attached to one´s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as dozed there) became hazy with the sond of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider´s thread is blotted with rain –drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept. And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whithbread hesitated at the corner of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap, snored.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”
― Iris Murdoch

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time