Feel for all you're worth

Feel, feel, I say--feel for all you're worth, even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.


carta de Henry James a Clare Sheridan

Love, perhaps, should always be this simple.

You make me feel like home. You make me feel that the world is not strange. What kinder gift can someone give another one? Is all this mere eloquence…or simple humanity…simple love. Love, perhaps, should always be this simple.


Anne Sexton, numa carta a Anthony Hecht

I will always scare

I cannot say I feel serene and happy. Happiness only in a sense, and never serenity,
because I will always scare; and more than anyone else - myself.

Letters To Milena, Franz Kafka

the only thing is not to melt in the meanwhile

I don't know why we live - the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup.


Henry James: Selected Letters (via Letters of Note)

For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough.

You rare girl, once again, you have a body that belongs to no lover, to no father, belongs to no one but you. Wear your sorrow like the lines on your palm. Like a shawl to keep you warm at night. Don’t mourn the love that is lost to you now. It is a book of poems whose meters worked their way into your pulse. Even if it has slipped from your hands, it will stay in your body.
You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god. He tried to sweeten you, to water you down. So you left. And now you have your heart all to yourself again. A heart like a stone cottage. Heart like a lover’s diary. Hope like an ocean.


Anais Nin, numa carta a Clementine von Radics (via)

remember to pull away the coverings

As I get older, I find I get more and more disagreeably solitary; In fact I foresee the day when I shall have gone too far into myself that there will no longer be anything to be seen of me at all. Will you, please, remember to pull away the coverings from time to time? Or I shall get quite lost.

Vita Sackville-West numa carta a Virginia Woolf (via)

How strange talking is

what mists rise and fall -- how one loses the other and then thinks to have found the other -- then down comes another soft final curtain. . . . But it is incredible -- don't you feel -- how mysterious and isolated we each of us are -- at the last. I suppose one ought to make this discovery once and for all, but I seem to be always making it again.

Katherine Mansfield, numa carta datada de 1921 (via)

like an outcast

Where are those old friends with whom in years gone by I felt so closely united? Now it seems as if we belonged to different worlds, and no longer spoke the same language! Like a stranger and an outcast, I move among them — not one of their words or looks reaches me any longer. I am dumb for no one understands my speech — ah, but they never did understand me! It is terrible to be condemned to silence when one has so much to say.

Was I made for solitude or for a life in which there was no one to whom I could speak? The inability to communicate one's thoughts is in very truth the most terrible of all kinds of loneliness. Difference is a mask which is more ironbound than any iron mask.

Friedrich Nietzsche, numa carta à irmã (1886)

ᔥ toward the creative nothing