Anne Sexton
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)
Category: Confessional
Martha Gellhorn
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)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me. ― Edna St. Vincent Millay, letter to Edith Wynne Matthison
Sylvia Plath
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, the diaphanous satins of a January windowwhite as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory! — Sylvia Plath, from “A Birthday Present,” Tne Collected Poems (Turtleback Books, January 1, 1999) Originally published 1981.
Sylvia Plath
Electra on Azalea Path The day you died I went into the dirt,Into the lightless hibernaculumWhere bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzardLike hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.It was good for twenty years, that wintering —As if you never existed, as if I cameGod-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly:Her… Continue reading Sylvia Plath
Charles Bukowski
you will take them to the ocean,to the last mermaid,seaweed and shark, merry whale,end of flesh and hour and horror,and finally they stopand finally you go ontoward your ocean,the cigar biting your lipsthe way loved used to. — Charles Bukowski, “The Race,” At Terror Street and Agony Way, (Ellipsis London Pr Ltd, January 1, 2000)… Continue reading Charles Bukowski
Franz Kafka
I have this vision: That I would finally come and find you. Scattered pieces of distance would not stand in my way. Not needing words; the barest of glimpses would suffice for you and me. – Franz Kafka, Letters To Milena (Schocken; Rev Upd edition April 7, 1990)
Charles Bukowski
She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be. — Charles Bukowski, Factotumn ( Ecco, May 31, 2002) Originally t published 1975.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks & hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn: a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from a letter to Thomas… Continue reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Charles Bukowski
To give life you must take life,and as our grief falls flat and hollowupon the billion-blooded seaI pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmedwith white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatureslengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrowdid to you; I am old when it is fashionable to beyoung; I cry… Continue reading Charles Bukowski
The Vale of Soul-Making 