Eric Adolf

“I want you to know, because I fell in love with you the moment I saw you on the bus. I could think of no way to become acquainted with you except by acting rashly -- foolishly, to be accurate. But then, one is a fool when one is in love.

I loved the way your lips were so slightly parted. You represented the answer to everything to me”
― J. D. Salinger, The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger

“Instantly they fettered him, and carried him away to the regiment. There he was made to wheel about to the right, and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march, and they gave him thirty blows with a cudgel. The next day he did his exercise a little less badly, and he received but twenty blows. The day following they gave him only ten, and he was regarded by his comrades as a prodigy. Candide,”
― Voltaire, Candide

“delicate Adonis is dying
Kythereia
what should we do?
strike yourselves
maidens
and tear your garments”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Abruptly, then, and very quickly, she went in the farthest and most anonymous-looking of the seven or eight enclosures-which, by luck, didn’t require a coin for entrance-closed the door behind her, and, with some little difficulty, manipulated the bolt to a locked position. Without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment, she sat down. She brought her knees together very firmly, as if to make herself a smaller, more compact unit. Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. Her extended fingers, though trembling or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty. She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment-then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body.”
― J. D. Salinger