When She Wasn't Present

"When she wasn’t
present as body she was the soul’s image
in everything. Drawing me closer
to the orbits of planets. Distancing me from life
on earth."

—Mahmoud Darwish, from “A Mask … For Majnoon Laila” (tr. by Fady Joudah), in The Butterfly’s Burden. Copper Canyon Press, 2006

Lolita

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.”

-  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita