Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point… Continue reading Rainer Maria Rilke
You ask my companions. Hills, sir, and the sunshine, and a dog large as myself … I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. They are religious except me, and address an eclipse every morning whom they… Continue reading Emily Dickinson
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations though Friends are if possible an event more fair. ― Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson late 1872.
[I] wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds. — Samuel Beckett, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider (First Edition, January 1, 1998)
I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises. Then comes… Continue reading Katherine Mansfield
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” ― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne (Penguin Books; Media tie-in edition, September 16, 2009)
Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. — Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena (Schocken; Rev Upd edition April 7, 1990)
I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy … — George Sand, from letter to Gustave Flaubert, 9 May 1867, The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters, trans. Aimee L. McKenzie (Boni and Liveright, 1921)
I feel lonely for the sound of your voice.[…]I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life. — Anne Sexton – From a letter to Anne Clarke, Published in A Self-Portrait In Letters ( Houghton Mifflin: Boston, January 1, 1977)
And I do not know what to think or how to think; there is only this longing for you which is uncontrollable, frightening and quite useless. — Martha Gellhorn,from “a letter to David Gurewitsch, April 5, 1950,” Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (Holt Paperbacks, 2007)
The Vale of Soul-Making 