Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candleight.
Face love-lit
Gifts underfoot.

—James Merrill, "Christmas Tree"

But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?—This in’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

It's always Marx, Lenin and revolution,—real girl's talk.

—Nina Simone

We live in the debris of many ended worlds, whose inhabitants continue to live on.

—Alexis Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility

I don’t yet know that I possess/ a body built for love.

– Richie Hofmann, “Idyll”

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counter glance, between I love you and I love you too, the absent presence of desire comes alive.

—Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

Your affection for me ties me to the world. It is knowing that I am in someone's thoughts that causes me to be."

—Phillipe Besson, In the Absence of Men

The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me.

—Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time—the moment of entering can never be remembered.

Derek Jarman, Modern Nature