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“I have already told you that some few casual words spoken of you — [not very kindly] — by Miss Lynch, were the first in which I had ever heard your name mentioned. She described you, in some [m]easure, personally. She alluded to what she called your ‘eccentricities’ and hinted at your sorrows. […] She had referred to thoughts, sentiments, traits, moods which I knew to be my own, but which, until that moment, I had believed to be my own solely — unshared by any human being. A profound sympathy took immediate possession of my soul. I cannot better explain to you what I felt than by saying that your unknown heart seemed to pass into my bosom — there to dwell forever — while mine, I thought, was translated into your own. From that hour I loved you. Yes, I now feel that it was then — on that evening of sweet dreams — that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy Night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight, half of anxiety.”

— Edgar Allan Poe, from a letter to Sarah H. Whitman, 1 October 1848, The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, eds. J. W. Ostrom, B. R. Pollin and J. A. Savoye (Harvard University Press, 1948 ;Gordian Press, 1966 & 2008)

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“Je connais trop ces heures silencieuses qui viennent sans qu’on les appelle et aspirent au soleil qui brille si loin d’elles.”

— Franz Xavier Kappus, en réponse à Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres à un jeune poète

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“Le grand homme fragile devint une montagne russe d’émotions, que le rire, l’alcool, la fête et le sarcasme enveloppaient telle une cape magique pour le protéger des ombres tristes de l’enfance et des amours enfouies qui remontaient parfois en lui comme une méchante marée.”

— Fabrice Gaignault, Patrick Procktor, le secret de David Hockney

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“That frame of mind which we call ‘artistic’ is the frame of mind in which we are aware of beauty.”

— R. G. Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art

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“What I’m looking for may not be there. What you’re looking for may not be me. I’m listening for the return of that sound I heard in the woods just now, that silvery sound that seemed to call not only to me.”

— Maureen N. McLane, closing lines to “What I’m Looking For,” This Blue: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014)

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Oliver Herford, “I Heard a Bird Sing”

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“I have already told you that some few casual words spoken of you — [not very kindly] — by Miss Lynch, were the first in which I had ever heard your name mentioned. She described you, in some [m]easure, personally. She alluded to what she called your ‘eccentricities’ and hinted at your sorrows. […] She had referred to thoughts, sentiments, traits, moods which I knew to be my own, but which, until that moment, I had believed to be my own solely — unshared by any human being. A profound sympathy took immediate possession of my soul. I cannot better explain to you what I felt than by saying that your unknown heart seemed to pass into my bosom — there to dwell forever — while mine, I thought, was translated into your own. From that hour I loved you. Yes, I now feel that it was then — on that evening of sweet dreams — that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy Night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight, half of anxiety.”

— Edgar Allan Poe, from a letter to Sarah H. Whitman, 1 October 1848, The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, eds. J. W. Ostrom, B. R. Pollin and J. A. Savoye (Harvard University Press, 1948 ;Gordian Press, 1966 & 2008)

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Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1944

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“…your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”

— Letters to a Young Poet | Rainer Maria Rilke

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whatever was left, that was ours for a while.

sunrise - louise glück

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do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light

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“Those of us who think we know the same secrets are silent together most of the time, for us there is eloquence in desire, and for a while when in love and exhausted it’s enough to nod like shy horses and come together in a quiet ceremony of tongues it’s in disappointment we look for words to convince us the space between stars are nothing to worry about, it’s when those secrets burst in that emptiness between our hearts and the lumps in our throats. And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have”

— Stephen Dunn, “Those of Us Who Think We Know,” New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1994)

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“Slight, thin and delicate, denied practically all the physical conditions which, compared with others, could qualify me, too, as a whole human being; melancholy, sick in my mind, profoundly and inwardly a failure in many ways, I was given one thing: an eminently astute mind, presumably to keep me from being completely defenseless.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers

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“You are night, my darling: night at the peak of its lunar, feminine power. You are midnight: culminating shadow where dreams culminate, where love culminates.”

— — Miguel Hernández, from Selected Poems; “Child of Light and Shadow,”

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“I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.”

— John Burroughs, The Writings of John Burroughs (via books-n-quotes)

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“I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year;”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Sonnet XXVII,” Collected Poems (Harper and Brothers, 1956)