My flesh is sad, alas! . . .
–Stéphane Mallarmé

His youth is roaring inside him, he does not hear.
–Madame de Sévigné

We heal as we console ourselves; the heart cannot always weep or always love.
–La Bruyér, Characters, Chapter IV, The Heart

The poets say that Apollo tended the flocks of Admetus; so too each man is a God in disguise who plays the fool.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

And so, beginning with the rising sun, he was consumed, on the seaweed of the shore, keeping at the bottom of his heart, like an arrow in the liver, the burning wound of the great Kypris.
–Theocrites: The Cyclops

Amid the oblivion we seek in false
delights,
The sweet and melancholy scent of lilac
blossoms
Wafts back more virginal through our
intoxications.
–Henri de Régnier: Sites, Poem 8 (1887)

No other place is more deeply imbued with my mother, so thoroughly has it been permeated with her presence, and even more so her absence. To a person who loves, is not absence the most certain, the most effective the most durable, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences?
–Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days

And the furious wind of concupiscence
Makes your flesh flap like an old flag.
–Charles Baudelaire