Franny Choi, from Soft Science; “On the night of the election,”
[Text ID: “I didn’t even get close. / I called and called / and nothing came. / I had a body, and / it refused to rise for work.”]
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“I wish you to know
that you have been the last dream of my soul.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
"I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small."
— Callista Buchen, Taking Care
Anaïs Nin, Fire: From “A Journal of Love”: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934–1937
Hate is perhaps more intense and longer lasting than love. It’s as beautiful and as holy as love itself. Whoever doesn’t know how to hate doesn’t know how to love. Of all poets, Dante moves me most deeply because of the power of hate in him, equalled only by the power of his love. The most implacable enemies are also the most passionately tender lovers.
Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me (tr. by Jeannette Howard Foster), 1904
How he loves you! And ah, how he hates you!…
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies (tr. by Stuart Gilbert & Lionel Abel), 1943
Deep in my enemy I find the lover;
Pierre Corneille, The Cid (tr. by A.S. Kline), 1636
He and I are closer than friends. We are enemies linked together.
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1893
Come as enemy or friend, that does not matter to me. You shall be the millstone round my neck, and I’ll like you the better for it.
Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn, 1936
Claire C. Holland, from I Am Not Your Final Girl: Poems; “Ginger”
[Text ID: “I got cursed, in every way a / woman can. / You kill yourself, over and over, / to be different.”]