“Night and Love and Wine want no half-measures.”
- Ovid

“For he who lives more lives than one,
more deaths than one must die.”
- Oscar Wilde

“And neither the angels in heaven above,
nor the demons down under the sea,
can ever dissever my soul from the soul
of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”
- Edgar Allan Poe

“Wheat fields say nothing to me.  Which is sad.  But you have hair the color of gold.  So it will be wonderful, once  you’ve tamed me!  The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you.  And I’ll love the sound of  the wind in the wheat…”
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“With two bright eyes, my star, my love,
Thou lookest on the stars above:
Ah, would that I the heaven might be
With a million eyes to look on thee.”
- Plato/Henry Van Dyke

“Soon my flesh against your flesh grew ripe,
our faces flushed with heat,
and our sweet whisperings rose and then fell away.”
- Theokritos***

“If only you were beautiful for my eyes alone.”
- The Garland of Sulpicia

“I would like to be the wind
so that as you walked along the seashore
you could bare your breasts and let me caress you with my breath.”
- Unknown Greek Poet***

“Even when I’m gone,
I shall pursue you with dark fires,
and when cold death,
tears my soul from my body,
wherever you are,
my ghost will be there too.”
- Virgil***

“Time wastes too fast:
every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen.
The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return -
more every thing presses on –
and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu,
every absence which follows it,
are preludes to the eternal separation which we are shortly to make!”
- Laurence Sterne

“Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and most painful episodes, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible vitality even as it witnesses the destruction of its greatest heroes — that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity — that tragic joy included even joy in destruction.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

*** Buy “The sweetness of honey and the sting of bees” by Michelle Lovric & Nikiforos Doxiadis Mardas for more ancient mediterranean poetry like this.