A Poet Reflects

montanablackart:

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”

—Anaïs Nin

(Source: quotableq)

What wave, what love, what foam,
For Oöos who moves swift as the sea?
Ah stay, my heart, the weight
of lovers, of loneliness
drowns me,
alas that their very names
so press to break my heart
with heart-sick weariness,
what would they be,
the very gods,
rearing their mighty length
beside the unharvested sea?

—H. D., closing strophe to “Sea-Heroes” from Coterie (1920)

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

—Louise Glück, from “Summer Night” in The Seven Ages (Ecco, 2001)

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.”

—Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Let me tell you how sick with loneliness
I am.  What can I do while the distance
throbs on my back like a hump,
or say, with the stars stinging me
through the wheel?  You are before me,
behind me things rattle their deaths out
like paper.

—C. K. Williams, from “Even If I Could” in C. K. Williams: Poems 1963-1983 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988)

beverleyshiller:

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

 —Joan Didion 

(Source: elliottholt)

jeanetteleblanc:

“Do you ever feel that way?”
“Lonely?”
“Restless. As if you haven’t really met yourself yet. As is you’d passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt-‘Ah! There I Am! I’ve been missing that piece!’ But it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. And you spend the rest of your days looking for it.”

—Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing (Random House, 2007)

(Source: creatingaquietmind)

On these days, we are a city floating
lonely as a water lily,
lapped by elements, rich in isolation
from our race, no tongue too foreign to bloom,
no lordly hand to tear us from our stem.

—Anne Pierson Wiese, closing lines to “in the garden at the time of the evening breeze” from Floating City (Louisiana State University Press, 2007)

nikipattanaik:

“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?”

—David Foster Wallace 

(Source: thecrackerfactory)