Andrea

“I had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer
belonged to me as I had tried to believe. Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“I went to China,
I went to Prague;
I died, and was born in the spring;
I found you, and loved you, again.”
― Mary Oliver, White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems

“Intimacy could distort one's vantage, that much was true. Sometimes trying to see the whole of a person could be like describing a painting with your nose pressed to the canvas, though my husband would have argued that I hadn't wanted to see from a different angle, hadn't wanted to step back.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.”
― Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook