friendship
I seem to spend my life missing you.
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, Nov. 10, 1969, reprinted in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 655.
Books are the greatest companions, confessors, confidantes, tutors, a source of pleasure, a cure for loneliness, and to find one, in the middle of an island in Tahiti, in the heart of the Moroccan desert, or at an airport where one is stranded for a night, is to find the friend who reminds us we are not alone.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 104.
Another thing we have in common was good, solid, loving, and companionate marriages. On one of our car trips, I complained over the useless, trivial hyperactivity of my eyes gazing at women. At any conference, or in an airport on the way, I find myself continually checking out the beauty of young women, dwelling on figures and faces. It disturbed me that I wasted time and energy evaluating quarries I would never mine. Wendell agreed explosively, as if he had been waiting for someone to bring up the subject. He suffered from this idle habit himself, and found himself in lecture halls doing inventories of the female audience. One day, he told me, he saw one face that was absolutely perfect and irresistible to him. It was a few seconds before he realized that his eyes had lighted on his wife, Tanya.
“The Best Noise in the World,” in Wendell Berry: Life and Work edited by Jason Peters (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 46.
My friend was irreplaceable, and her death left a jagged hole I will spend the rest of my life tiptoeing around the edges of. Writing about her loss—to her husband, now a widower, and her mother—was an opportunity to play geographer, and draw a map of the contours of our shared sorrow.
“The Lost Art of the Condolence Letter,” New York Times, February 10, 2014.
The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.
Sweet Thursday (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), rev. edition, 120.
I want to be your south wind—bringing good and fruitful things only.
Letter to Henry Miller, October 8, 1933, in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932–1953 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989), 215.
Dearest Eudora, what there is to say we have said, in one way or another.
Letter to Eudora Welty, January 15, 1996, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Marrs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 440.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2002), 67.
Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self…
Letter to Robert Lowell, August 26, 1963, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 332.
[Cyril Connolly] had never been a good critic, because among other things, he could not pan a friend. (I know this seems a barbarous test, but without it, everything comes unstuck; and nonfriends suffer disproportionately.)
“Cyril Connolly,” in The Good Word and Other Words (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 49.
We were not children together but we are now.
“Dear Friend,” in Embryoyo: New Poems (San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2007), 76.
He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame.” Right to the end.
“Christopher Hitchens: ‘the consummate writer, the brilliant friend,'” Guardian, December 16, 2011.