[C]onsidering the length of time that had elapsed she had not changed very much, that is to say her face was not too utterly demolished for the face of a human creature subject, as we all are, to deformation at every moment of her trajectory into the abyss towards which she had been launched, that abyss whose direction we can express only by means of comparisons that are all equally invalid, since we can borrow them only from the world of space and their sole merit, whether we give them the orientation of height, length or depth, is to make us feel that this inconceivable yet apprehensible dimension exists.

— Proust, Time Regained

Encompass’d with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors. . . .
I . . . in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground

— William Cowper

Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.

Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

— Proust, Time Regained

Lo, my name is abhorred,
Lo, more than the odour of carrion
On summer days when the sky is hot.

Lo, my name is abhorred,
Lo, more than the odour of crocodiles,
More than sitting under the bank of crocodiles.

Lo, my name is abhorred,
Lo, more than a woman
Against whom a lie is told her husband.

. . . .

Death is before me today
As the odour of myrrh,
As when one sitteth under the sail on a windy day.

Death is before me today
As the odour of lotus flowers,
As one sitteth on the shore of drunkenness.

Death is before me today
As a man longs to see his house
When he has spent years in captivity.

[From Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast]

Sorrows are servants, obscure and detested, against whom one struggles, beneath whose dominion one more and more completely falls, dire and dreadful servants whom it is impossible to replace and who by subterranean paths lead us towards truth and death.

— Proust, Time Regained

It is time to take off the amber
Time to change the words,
Time to put out the lamp
Above the door . . .

— Marina Tsvetaeva

(every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before — indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our lives with divinities).

— Proust, Time Regained

One day when she had been left alone for a moment I found her out of bed, standing in her nightdress trying to open the window.

— Proust, The Guermantes Way

I walk from room to room trying to think of something to do — for a while I will do something, make cookies or clean the bathroom — make beds — answer the telephone — but all along I have this almost terrible energy in me and nothing seems to help. . . . I walk up and down the room — back and forth — and I feel like a caged tiger.

— Anne Sexton