Emily Brontë
You said I killed you-haunt me, then! Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights. (Thomas Cautley Newby December 1847)
Month: October 2016
Robert Frost
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars–on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. ― Robert Frost, from “Desert Places,” The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. (Holt Paperbacks; 2 Revised edition April 1, 2002)
Henry Miller
What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin– to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it. — Henry… Continue reading Henry Miller
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns… — Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from “Before… Continue reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Virginia Woolf
Always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours. — Virginia Woolf, The Hours. (Picador November 1, 2002) Originally published November 1998.
Pablo Neruda
My hands lifted it up and I gazed as if the sea were alive in that single drop, as if amid the struggle of the earth and the waters one flower were to raise a small banner of blue flame, of irresistible peace, of indomitable purity.… Continue reading Pablo Neruda
Edvard Munch
Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder. — Edvard Munch
B. H. Fairchild
We’re a dream drifting down on a beach in the rain in the sleep of our lives … We are troubled by sea and sky. Our words dissolve in the waves. On the edges of speech is the sound of the rain coming down. It comes down. — B. H. Fairchild, from “At Omaha Beach,”… Continue reading B. H. Fairchild
Charles Bukowski,
When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat. — Charles Bukowski, Factotum. (Ecco May 31, 2002) Originally published 1975.
Franz Wright
I do notice the more I lose touch with what I previously saw as my life the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes— it is infinite. What we experience as space, the sky that is, the sun, the stars is intimate and rather small by comparison. — Franz Wright, from “Letter,… Continue reading Franz Wright
The Vale of Soul-Making 