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: Letter
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
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)
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
Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Sidgwick and Jackson (January 1, 1945)
Albert Camus
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that’s the best they can hope for. — Albert Camus, Correspondence, 1932-1960. (University of Nebraska Press; annotated edition edition May 1, 2003)
Marcel Proust
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you. — Marcel Proust, , in a letter to Anatole France, Selected Letters: 1880-1903. (Univ of Chicago Pr (Tx) November 1988)
Vincent van Gogh
So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress. — Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent… Continue reading Vincent van Gogh
Simone Weil
The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation … we should welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, and experience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all the sweetness or bitterness as the case may be. Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good, in the… Continue reading Simone Weil
The Vale of Soul-Making 