Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet. Far away the sea sounds and resounds. Pablo Neruda, from “Here I Love You,” Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, translated by W.S. Merwin (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Girls are cruelest to themselves. Someone like Emily Brontë, who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman, had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow. Anne Carson, Excerpt of The Glass Essay from Glass, Irony and God (via lesgardenias)