"There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world."
--David Whyte, from “The Truelove,” The Sea In You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love (Many Rivers Press, 2016)

"The sunflower is mine, in a way."
--Vincent Van Gogh

"if you lie there asleep on the floor after lunch
what else is there for me to do but adore you"
--Frank O'Hara, from Biotherm: for Bill Berkson

“I can’t hold enough of you in my hands.”
--Franz Kafka, from Letters to Milena

“I want to sleep with you, fall asleep and sleep. That magnificent folk word, how deep, how true, how unequivocal, how exactly what it says. Just—sleep. And nothing more. No, one more thing: my head buried in your left shoulder, my arm around your right one—and that’s all. No, another thing: and know right into the deepest sleep that it is you.”
--Marina Tsvetaeva, from Letters Summer 1926 (in a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke)

"two mingled bodies do not form a separate subject and object. I caress your skin, I kiss your mouth. Who, I? Who, you?"
--Michel Serres, from The Five Senses : A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?] By Marilyn Hacker