Maria

“So, either by thy picture or my love,
  Thy self away, art present still with me;
  For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,
  And I am still with them, and they with thee;
    Or, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight
    Awakes my heart, to heart's and eye's delight.”
― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
    From me far off, with others all too near.”
― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“—I told you, we must cut out imagination. In everyone...Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do!”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, WE

“Nearness is undemanding and therefore unproductive in a way. What we know is near to us – no effort required. What we don’t know is remote from us, at a distance, we’re not in the same place as what we don’t know, and so we have to traverse that distance in order to learn. Longing requires distance – longing for another place, another state, another person, another set of things we know – and if there’s one thing that drives us, individually and collectively, it’s longing.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity