In some far off place Many light years in space I'll wait for you. Where human feet have never trod, Where human eyes have never seen. I'll build a world of abstract dreams And wait for you. — Sun Ra, Monorails and Satellites

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It felt like I swallowed the sun when we first met. — Shunji Iwai, April Story

then, with a passion exceeding all my passions, I long for her kiss's sun to shine in my mouth, on my day of reckoning and deep shadows, and I shall say: 'Come close!' And if I thought I might taste her lips the day I die, I should long for the day of my death as if for the Messiah. — T. Carmi ט. כרמי, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (2006)

Love is not consolation. It is light. — Simone Weil

When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. ― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

For no eye has ever seen the sun without becoming sun-like, nor could a soul ever see beauty without becoming beautiful. You must first actually become wholly God-like and wholly beautiful if you intend to see God and beauty. — Plotinus, 1.6.9.31-34

If the eye were not kindred to the Sun, it could not behold its light. — Goethe

La terre entière, continuellement imbibée de sang, n'est qu'un autel immense où tout ce qui vit doit être immolé sans fin, sans mesure, sans relâche, jusqu'à la consommation des choses, jusqu'à l'extinction du mal, jusqu'à la mort de la mort (The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be immolated without end, without measure, without respite, until the consummation of things, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.) — Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg

'Come, my friends!' I said. 'Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.' — Manifesto of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso F.T. Marinetti

He could refract an idea which everyone thought simple into a hundred others, as the prism does with sunlight, each finer than the other, then gather together a host of others to recreate the white light of the sun, where others merely saw disorder and confusion. — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg as quoted in The Intelligence of Evil: Or, The Lucidity Pact by Jean Baudrillard

She appeared like an angel. Out of this filthy mess, she is alone. They... cannot... touch... her... — Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. Him that I love, I wish to be free – even from me. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation. — Louise Brooks through James Card, Sight & Sound (Summer 1958, p. 240)

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself. — Carl Jung

Why do I feel this alone? Basically, because I’ve always been alone. I’ve always been alone. And alone I’ll be. It’s about time I become aware of it and never forget it. — Andrei Tarkovsky

Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man. — Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity ... Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is ... this nostalgia is responsible for ... eroticism in man. Erotism is the affirmation of life, even in death — Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The industriousness of the ancients is in our hands; they even make their past present in our times and we are struck dumb; their memory lives in us and we are without memorials of our own. What a miracle! The dead are alive and the living are buried by them. — Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium (12th century, ed. 1914 M.R. James, p. 203)

All soap abandon ye who enter here. — Krazy Kat Klub (1919)

It is inconceivable that something is lost forever. — The Instructions of Shuruppak, 2600 BCE