Luke

“To have your every wish, desire,   Wake, regard the glorious light!   What holds you bound is a mild power,   Sleep’s a shell, break out of it!   Up, no lagging, boldly does it;   Though the crowd doubts and delays,   All’s possible to a brave spirit 4830 Who sees, and seeing’s quick to seize.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One and Two

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley