The Rest of Love Quotes

“Technically, the weight of pain is the weight of shadow.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“When was the burning that of fire?
When was it fear?
When sorrow?
That any gesture can be understood as the necessary, mostly incidental price the body pays for whatever response comes
past gesture,
past the body that made it:
to what extent can this be said, and it be true? and it be false? Under what conditions?
Under whose conditions?
Thus the waves. Thus the light of the sun across them.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“There
is a glamour,
even to a thing undoing itself”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“a language that, all this time, we knew.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to be found.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Twin bells, those questions”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Radiance unrelenting—
no peace, no shadow,
no shelter now—”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“traced

far enough, past hope, back across
belief, it ends always
at desire”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“until
the image itself
has grown distorted past
all recognition save
that of memory”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“If I remember it, did it happen?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“In the meadow, in
adoration: am I not yours?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“The light
extends like truth, the truth like
a hand extending at the same time as
it recedes.
What is that like?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Why does it seem
I won't come back here? Why speak of it

as of, already, a place I miss?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Is there

no saving
what betrays itself?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“I know, released, she won't come back.
This is different from letting what,

already, we count as lost go. It is nothing
like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what
losing a thing we love feels like, Oh yes:

I love her.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Here—
your shirt, he said,
after. Lifting it. Bringing it

to me as if it were
not a shirt
but a thing immaculate,

or in flames, or—
with a single sword
positioned through it—

a sacred heart.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“There, beside the shifting fact of
all that water. What's done is done.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“How at first a sweetness;
how, by turns, a gift, a darkness.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“And
—already—you are leaving. You have
crossed the water.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“As if
sometimes the world really did amount to
a quiet arrangement.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“The ancient Greeks; the Romans after. How they

made of love a wild god”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“from within their
thicket of nowhere left to hide”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Human gesture. Betrayed,
betrayed.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Fear. Things invisible,

and the visible effects by which
we know them.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Is this
perfection,

or the cost of it?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“The heart—
at last nothing

but a muscle moving,

not at all the talisman you'd imagined:
how if only you could touch it—how
everything, everything might

yet be different
if you did . . .”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“afternoons I remember still: how the light
seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living
inside it, waiting— I'd heard all about

that one clear note it gives.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Here comes the word for mystery.
Here is the word for true.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Like asking at first Where am I
after dream—and the room, in pieces, slow,
comes back”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“A stillness like that of music resting—or sex,
after: what they call sadness, though it
is not sadness.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love