She hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults.
William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (1623), III.1
I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.
Mary Oliver, The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, Eds. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, and David Weiss

apoetreflects

I left a place where I was unhappy and leaving it did not make me happy.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, 01 September 1979
We don’t forget,
but something vacant settles in us.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, 30 January 1979
A stupefying, though not distressing notion - that she has not been ‘everything’ for me. If she had, I wouldn’t have written my work. Since I’ve been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was ‘everything’ for me, and I’ve completely forgotten that I had ever written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers. Before, she had made herself transparent so that I could write.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, 29 October 1978
The only thing is not to melt in the meanwhile.
Henry James in a letter to Grace Norton (1883)
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
Something real was happening; this was, as it were, her life.
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970)
In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970), p. 170
She liked his not knowing her. She did not much like him but she liked his not knowing her.
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970), p. 152