Nusch Eluard & Rainer Maria Rilke

Dora Maar, 1935

 

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses

 who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. 

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, 

something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Jean Painlevé & Dejan Stojanovic

Photo by Jean Painlevé, Hippocampe femelle, 1931 

 I am the shore and the ocean, 

awaiting myself on both sides.

Dejan Stojanovic

Sebastião Salgado & Santosh Kalwar

Photo by Sebastiao Salgado, Aqua Mater 

 

Always be like water. 

Floats in the times of pain

 or dance

like waves 

along the wind

 which touches its surface.

Santosh Kalwar 

Petecia Le Fawnhawk & Italo Calvino

Photo by Lefawnhawk , Modern Desert Magic




The ideal place for me
 is the one
 in which
 it is most natural
 to live
 as a foreigner.


Italo Calvino
The uses of literature

Herb Ritts & R.T. Bennet

Photo by Herb Ritts, Male nude, 1985



Accept yourself,
love yourself,
and keep moving forward.
If you want to fly,
you have to give up what weights you down.

Roy T. Bennet
The light in the heart

Robert Mapplethorpe & Cormac McCarthy

Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, White Gaze

Scars

 have the strange power

 to remind us

 that our past

 is real.

Cormac McCarthy

Roberto Kusterle & 4 Non Blondes

Photo by Roberto Kusterle



And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I, I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs
What' s going on?

4 Non Blondes

Helena Almeida & Borges

Pintura habitada, by Helena Almeida, 1975




I know what the Greeks do not know,
incertitude.


Jorge Luis Borges,
Labyrinths

Brooke Shaden & Roberto Bolaño

Brooke Shaden




So everything lets us down
 including curiosity and honesty
and what we love best.
Yes, said the voice,
but cheer up ,
 it is fun in the end.

Roberto Bolano
2666

Emmanuelle Brisson & Carl Sagan

Farfalle, by Emmanuelle Brisson




We are like butterflies who flutter for a day
and think it is
forever.

Carl Sagan

Julia Margaret Cameron & Aristotle

Photo by Julia Margaret Cameron, I wait (Rachel Gurney), 1872




Patience is bitter,

but its fruit is sweet.

Aristotle

Pavel Baňka & Robert Browning

Photo by Pavel Banka, Vertical Construction, 1985




My sun sets to rise again.

Robert Browning 

Jalali Bahman & Paul Anka

Photo by Jalali Bahman, Image of imagination



You caught me fooling around for sombody new
You caught me fooling around now I am losing you
'Cause you are a one man woman
You' re one man woman
You' re one man woman
But I am a two timing man.


Paul Anka
One man woman, one woman man

Izu Yumiko & Gyula Krudy

Photo by Izu Yumiko, Secret Garden, 2007



Let crazy life rush headlong on the highway for others;
we shall contemplate the sunflowers,
watch them sprout, blossom, fade away.
Yesterday they were still giants,
but now,
in autumn,
they are thatch on the roof.

Gyula Krudy,
Sunflowers

Alikhanzadeh Samira & Pablo Neruda

Photo by Alikhanzadeh Samira, Peace, 2013


I can write the saddest lines tonight.

Write for example: ‘The night is fractured
and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’

The night wind turns in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.
To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.

Hear the vast night, vaster without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.

What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.
The night is fractured and she is not with me.

That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,
my soul is not content to have lost her.

As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.
My heart looks for her: she is not with me


The same night whitens, in the same branches.
We, from that time, we are not the same.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.

Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.
Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,
my soul is not content to have lost her.

Pablo Neruda, If You Forget Me

Beatrice Helg & Rumi

Photo by Beatrice Helg, Geometrie 1, 1984





The cure for pain is in the pain.

Rumi 

Biernat Magda & George R. R. Martin

Photo by Magda Biernat, Adrift, 2013




Nothing burns like the cold.

George R.R. Martin
A Game of Thrones 

Yamamoto Masao & Pablo Neruda

Photo by Yamamoto Masao, from the series Nakazora, 2001




As if you were on fire from within.
The moon
lives
 in the lining of your skin.

Pablo Neruda

Hooper Chip & P. Coelho

Photo by Chip Hooper, Giant's Tooth, Tasman Sea, 2003




Life
 always waits
 for some crisis to occur
before revealing
 itself at its
most
brilliant.

Paulo Coelho
Eleven Minutes


www.chiphooper.com

Seth Miller & Jane Austen

Photo by Seth Miller, Woman with Umbrella, 2011

I could easily forgive his pride, 

if he had not 

mortified mine.

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice