love
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.
You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage.
The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 59.
I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 143.
She refused to sleep in the same bed with a dead love, the skeleton of a passion.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 82.
I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, ‘Put in some tooth twine. I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me. It had been a long search, but it was worth it.
Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 81.
Your old lovers get to be your really old lovers, and you can’t remember who broke up with who, or who got mad at who—just that the two of you remember things that no one else in the world does.
“This Is What 80 Looks Like,” by Gail Collins, New York Times, March 22, 2014.
I’d get an idea and wouldn’t know how to make it work, and she’d figure out how to make it work.
describing his wife, in “Toshi Seeger, Wife of Folk-Singing Legend, Dies at 91,” by Douglas Martin, New York Times, July 11, 2013.
Mother-love, in beasts and birds, can’t always be observed carefully, because of innate animal secrecy, but—to revisit an old Ohio highway for a moment—I once encountered a mother quail leading her young across the road in a single file. She diverted my attention from them by pretending to have a broken wing, and flopped around almost at my feet, in an exhibition of bravura acting something like that of the late Lionel Barrymore as Rasputin. When the small birds had disappeared into the deep grass, she flew calmly away and joined them.
“And So to Medve,” in Old Dogs Remembered, ed. by Bud Johns (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1993), 27–28.
Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside.
“An Average Sadness,” in I Thought My Father Was God (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 379.
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.
I feel, sometimes, like I have a map in my pocket that folds up, and I pull it out, and it’s bigger than the table, and there’s a thousand places to go with her.
Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR, October 31, 2011. [full transcript here]
For a long time I have felt the tug of my soul toward you as though you must be ill or in trouble, and it has taken a great control for me not to attempt to find you. I never hear of you, and I don’t know where you are, for all I know you may be wandering in Europe again. I am not hysterical, nor suffering from any illness, I know only that I love you with undying and undefeated love. I am waiting to see your work, how much you have gained by your freedom from our separation.
Letter to Thomas Wolfe, November 16, 1932, in My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein, ed. by Suzanne Stutman (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 349.