• "Tell me where you are./ Turns and returns. I can’t stand it."

Antonio Machado, from “Advices, Verses, Notes,” Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, transl. by Willis Barnstone (Copper Canyon Press, 2003)

• "Between what is said and not meant/ And what is meant and not said/ Most of love is lost."

Khalil Gibran

• “Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”

Salman Rushdie

• "The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone."

Joan Didion, Blue Nights

• “This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next-and I didn’t want to forget a single one.”

Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

• "Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street."

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell in a letter

• "Something was and wasn’t there between us,/ something went on and went away."

Wislawa Szymborska, from First Love

• "Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space."

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "We moved like angels washing themselves./ We moved like two birds on fire."

Anne Sexton, How We Danced

• "We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost."

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

• "How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."

Milan Kundera

• "Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Nice Quiet Place

• "Forever. My God, how funny! Forever."

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

• "But the heart has its own memory and I have forgotten nothing."

Albert Camus, The Fall

• "Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story."

Richard Siken, The Worm King’s Lullaby

• "Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident."

Louis de Bernières

• "That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she’d never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet."

Janet Fitch

• "CHORUS : Why are you so in love with/ things unbearable?"

Sophokles, Elektra (tr. by Anne Carson)

• "—a sense of too much to say, to think, the urgency of the moment, so quickly passing: and then, afterward, one wonders what it is all about, what is the point of it, never saying quite enough, never touching another person quite as one might wish…"

Joyce Carol Oates

• I used to sit there / pulling arrows out of my heart.

Louise Glück, from “Fugue,” Averno: Poems

• "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call."

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

• "Better to say I’ve seen you/ barely at all. Better to say/ the lost moon will never guide us."

Paul Guest, from “A Brief History of History,” My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008)

• "All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware” — an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.”"

Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

• "They say that people who live next to waterfalls don’t hear the water. It was terrible at first. We couldn’t stand to be in the house for more than a few hours at a time. The first two weeks were filled with nights of intermittent sleep and quarreling for the sake of being heard over the water. We fought so much just to remind ourselves that we were in love, and not in hate. But the next weeks were a little better. It was possible to sleep a few good hours each night and eat in only mild discomfort. (We) still cursed the water, but less frequently, and with less fury. Her attacks on me also quieted. It’s your fault, she would say. You wanted to live here. Life continued, as life continues, and time passed, as time passes, and after a little more than two months: Do you hear that? I asked her one of the rare mornings we sat at the table together. Hear it? I put down my coffee and rose from my chair. You hear that thing? What thing? she asked. Exactly! I said, running outside to pump my fist at the waterfall. Exactly! We danced, throwing handfuls of water in the air, hearing nothing at all. We alternated hugs of forgiveness and shouts of human triumph at the water. Who wins the day? Who wins the day, waterfall? We do! We do! And this is what living next to a waterfall is like. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love."

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

• "We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost."

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

• "wash your dress in running water. dry it on the southern side of a rock. let them have four guesses and make them all wrong. take a fistful of snow in the summer heat. cook haluski in hot sweet butter. drink cold milk to clean your insides. be careful when you wake: breathing lets them know how asleep you are. don’t hang your coat from a hook in the door. ignore curfew. remember weather by the voice of the wheel. do not become the fool they need you to become. change your name. lose your shoes. practice doubt. dress in oiled cloth around sickness. adore darkness. turn sideways in the wind. the changing of stories is a cheerful affair. give the impression of not having known."

Colum McCann

• "I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone."

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

• "And if they were to give you everything you wanted, what would you do? Would you be satisfied? Would you stop searching for the source of the eruption? And, can you be secure in your happiness?"

Mahmoud Darwish, from “Happiness – When It Betrays,” Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Archipelago, 2010)

• "… I cannot save you though I burn with dreams."

Marge Piercy, from “Crescent moon like a canoe,” Moon is Always Female

• "I do not believe in the beauty of falling./ Over and over in the dark I tell myself/ I do not have to believe/ in the beauty of falling"

Mary Szybist, from “Holy,” Incarnadine: Poems

• "I feel terrible, like there’s a weight on my chest.’/‘A heart’s a heavy burden.’"

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Dir. Hayao Miyazaki

• The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely."

Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

• My love, I fear the silence of your hands."

Mahmoud Darwish, from A River Dies Of Thirst

• "My heart does not belong to me, nor to/ anyone else. It declared its/ independence from me before it turned into a stone."

Mahmoud Darwish,“From now on you are somebody else”, A River Dies of Thirst

• "[…] you are going to stay aren’t you, I said […] in a voice I could hear was shouting, but which he didn’t hear."

Hélène Cixous, from Inside (Schocken, 1969)

• "The desire to be loved is the last illusion: Give it up and you will be free."

Margaret Atwood, from “A Sunday Drive”

• "A flower left out./ My bones hold a stillness, the far/ Fields melt my heart."

Sylvia Plath, from Ariel

• "Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "What can I leave behind to remind you of me?/ My ghost? What use is a ghost to you?"

Anna Akhmatova, “Cinque,” In a Shattered Mirrror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova

• "How calmly you put/ your hand in mine,/ and left in my palm a lingering/ splinter of ice."

Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Girlfriend"

• "At first, I saw you everywhere./ Now only in certain things,/ at longer intervals."

Louise Glück, from section 3 of “From the Japanese,” The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco Press, 1985)

• "There would be the sea, the smell of the sea borne along on the wind, the sound of the sea and, shuddering, we would listen to its forgotten voice, saying don’t leave again, don’t’ leave again…"

Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, from The Prospector ( Atlantic Books, 2016)

• "You don’t love me?/ — Yes, but in torment"

Marina Tsvetaeva, Poem of the End

• "When it’s over, I realise it wasn’t love. Love is to be lived, not remembered."

Mahmoud Darwish, from “Darwish’s vision and longing” in Weekend

• "I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem/ there is no perfect ending./ Indeed, there are infinite endings./ Or perhaps, once one begins,/ there are only endings."

Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

• "Even when I look away I am still looking."

Richard Siken, from Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light (via 7-weeks)

• "Meanwhile the terror underneath grows, consolidates itself. How does anyone love?"

Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

• "It’s hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we’re left with a fistful of ashes."

Madeleine L'Engle

• "Too often longing arcs out/ into vagueness."

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke; “Uncollected Poems”

• "In the end, everyone is aware of this:/ nobody keeps any of what he has,/ and life is only a borrowing of bones."

Pablo Neruda

• "linzenity reblogged pictresque

The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace." Jacques Derrida (trans. Alan Bass), The Postcard: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond

• "I have wrung my hands and cried over no love all winter long."

Anne Sexton - from a letter to James Dickey featured in Anne Sexton: A Biography

• "It isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain."

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

• When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. in the beginning the love you get is the love that sets./ I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon...For most of my life I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love. Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care./ Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

Jeanette Winterson, from “Why be happy when you could be normal?”