“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.”
Gloria Steinem
more infosource: “This Is What 80 Looks Like,” by Gail Collins, New York Times, March 22, 2014.
category: aging, breakup, love, relationship
medium: newspaper article
“Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside.”
Ameni Rozsa
more infosource: “An Average Sadness,” in I Thought My Father Was God (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 379.
category: breakup, fortune, identity, loss, love, self
medium: Essay
“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.”
Aline Bernstein
more infosource: 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.
buy on Amazon
category: breakup, heartbreak, love
medium: Letter
“Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main this is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
John Steinbeck
more infosource: November 10, 1958 letter to Thom, his fourteen-year-old son, in Letters of a Nation, Andrew Carroll ed. (New York: Kodansha, 1997 ), 314.
category: advice, breakup, loss, love, school of life
medium: Letter
“He was unreliable, evasive, and sometimes too stoned to speak, but he was also kind, ingenuous, and a true poet. I knew he didn’t love me but I adored him anyway. Eventually he just drifted away, leaving me a long lock of his red-gold hair.”
Patti Smith
more infosource: description of Jim Carroll, in Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010), 167.
buy on Amazon
medium: memoir
“Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated November 28, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 68.
buy on Amazon
view on Google Books
category: breakup, death, love, mourning
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“I believe I learned with her to love a woman, and I can’t see where or how my heartsickness will end.”
Saul Bellow
more infosource: letter to Keith Botsford, dated November 5, 1959, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 183.
buy on Amazon
category: breakup, divorce, heartsick, love
medium: letter
“The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.”
Jeanette Winterson
more infosource: Written on the Body (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 156.
buy on Amazon
view on Google Books
category: breakup, loss, love, memory
medium: fiction
“Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.”
Antonio Porchia
more infosource: Voices: Aphorisms, selected and translated by W. S. Merwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 22.
category: absence, breakup, farewell, goodbye, grief
medium: aphorism
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
Henry David Thoreau
more infosource: The Journal 1837–1861 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 7.
buy on Amazon
view on Google Books
category: advice, breakup, love, remedy
medium: diary
notes: diary entry dated July 25, 1839
“She refused to sleep in the same bed with a dead love, the skeleton of a passion.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 82.
buy on Amazon
category: breakup, love, passion, sex
medium: diary
notes: from a spring 1969 entry in Nin's diary
“When was the first time you realized the next time would be the last time?”
Will Oldham
more infosource: “Thou Without (Partner),” Days in the Wake (Drag City, 1994).
buy on Amazon
category: breakup, death, ending, loss
medium: lyric
notes: Rich Bryan co-wrote this song
“When there’s an Associated Press bulletin quoting your husband saying that he has found his soul mate but he’s going to try to fall back in love with you, change the locks. (At your second home, too.)”
Maureen Dowd
more infosource: “Rules of the Wronged,” The New York Times, June 30, 2009.
view online
category: adultery, breakup, divorce, governor, Governor Mark Sanford, Jenny Sanford, marriage, politics, soul mate
medium: Op-Ed
breakup