Shy

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

“Theseus: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend.

Herakles: I fear to stain your clothes with blood.

Theseus: Stain them, I don't care.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Eros limbslackener shakes me again—
that sweet, bitter, impossible creature.”
― Jim Powell, The Poetry of Sappho

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov