“I Do Not Think I’m Easy To Define. I Have A Wandering Mind. And I’m Not Anything That You Think

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse on translating Abdulla Pashew's "Resurrection" (essay here, full poem here) [ID'd]

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Sorrow”, Collected Poems

“Envy is nothing else but hatred, in so far as it is disposing a man to rejoice in another’s hurt, and to grieve at another’s advantage.”

— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Ottis P. Lord written c. March 1878

“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Poem of the End: V (tr. by Elaine Feinstein)

Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

“Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”

— Lao Tzu