Nihad Marwan

“According to the mystics, the obscure matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than divine potentiality. The act of creation is God’s descent into an abyss that is simply his own potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and capacity not to . . . In this context, “abyss” is not a metaphor . . . It is the life of darkness in God, the divine root of Hell in which the Nothing is eternally produced. Only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets.”
― Giorgio Agamben

“I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963