We will be free to live our lives in our own way - free to love each other away from the people who can’t understand. We will go somewhere where they can never again take from us our right to live. Somewhere there is such a place, I’m sure. Lilyan Brock, Queer Patterns

And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident-like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

In a strange house, a strange bed in a strange town, a very strange me is waiting for you. James Baldwin, Munich, Winter 1973

I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

When you came, you were like red wine and honey And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness Amy Lowell, Decade

your kiss is my justice: look then now how orange blooms of jubilation unfold in satisfied air Gerrit Lansing, A Poem of Love in Eleven Lines

I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually. Colette, The Pure and the Impure

& now I know what my innards say illegal to cause people to panic to run to hurt there is no contradiction what the Nazis say will cause people to hurt ME. Pat Parker, Don’t Let The Fascists Speak

theory we’ve confused happiness with someone being able to say our name to us theory half the people here only know the outside Andrew McMillan, protest of the physical

She is just this side of wonderful, and suddenly the glamorous world fills itself with shining Janice Gould, Six Sonnets: Crossing the West

But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her. Brenda Shaughnessy, You Love, You Wonder

Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved. Eileen Myles, Inferno

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

There’s nothing worse than feeling bad and not being able to tell you. Frank O’Hara, Nocturne

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Vita Sackville-West, letter to Virginia Woolf

I was yours once till death if you’d cared to keep me, but I’m someone else’s now… and he’s mine in a way that shocks you EM Forster, Maurice

Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Come on the wings of great desire, Or stay away from me. Vita Sackville-West, No Obligation

Forget it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now. Sappho, trans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, One Girl

But the only ones for me are the ones that shouldn’t be Kae Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos