“I’m not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what’s on my bedside table rather than what’s in my bed.”

Michelle Williams

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“To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn’t, and it was sometimes a matter of what’s called luck and sometimes a matter of having or not having the gift to endure and the will to.”

Tennessee Williams

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“Into the little port you cannot sail unwelcome at any hour of day or night.”

Emily Dickinson

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“Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main this is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

John Steinbeck

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“Like a stone too heavy for me to move;
like a solid door which I can barely rattle and cannot open;
like a fruit-cluster hanging too high which my upward leapings can but touch with fingertips;
thus — what she can give and will not.”

Paul Valéry

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“Rimbaud was like my boyfriend. If you’re 15 or 16 and you can’t get the boy you want, and you have to daydream about him all the time, what’s the difference if he’s a dead poet or a senior?”

Patti Smith

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“The day is breaking someone else’s heart.”

James Merrill

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“What can you say about the first woman in your life? She was Mum. She sorted me out. She fed me. She was forever slicking my hair and straightening my clothes, in public. Humiliation. But it’s Mum. I didn’t realize until later that she was also my mate. She could make me laugh. There was music all the time, and I do miss her so.”

Keith Richards

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“The joy of my life with Harry is coming home from a fancy dinner with Harry—and Harry always hates the dinner, whatever it is—and him making himself a marmalade on toast standing in the kitchen and him ranting, ‘How the hell could it have gone on as long as it did?’”

Tina Brown

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“He was the artist of my life.”

Patti Smith

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“The right sort of love is recognized by the sort of joy, of general excitement, of exultant life which the presence of someone produces in us and which distinguishes them. You feel better when with them.”

Paul Valéry

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“It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”

Lorrie Moore

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“I believe that I have a spiritual connection with my husband that is beyond any explanation. We are two absolutely totally different people that come from different backgrounds, different cultures, races, language, everything. And yet I feel him inside me. We won’t part, I know. I know positively that nothing will separate us. Ever. Because we’ve found something that is very spiritual and has nothing to do with being sick or in good health, young or not. Poor or rich. No. It works on another level. So, I’ve relaxed for the first time in my life and I don’t care about the tall blondes any more. The world is full of tall blondes.”

Isabel Allende

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“I think we do need to carry the blueprint, the image of something we want. I don’t mean the impossible, the absolute thing, the romantic thing, the neurotic thing, the narcissistic thing like trying to find the twin who says ‘yes’ to everything. I mean once you are ready to accept the reality of human beings, then I think you do need to have a blueprint. I say the dream serves to guide us towards what we want. We do have to have a wish—I don’t mean that kind of impossible hope—but we do have to have some image of what we want to go towards, because that guides us.”

Anaïs Nin

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“He began to branch out, photographing those he met through his complex social life, the infamous and the famous, from Marianne Faithfull to a young tattooed hustler. But he always returned to his muse. I no longer felt that I was the right model for him, but he would wave my objections away. He saw in me more than I could see in myself. Whenever he peeled the image from the Polaroid negative, he would say, ‘With you I can’t miss.'”

Patti Smith

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