''The worst thing about a mental breakdown is that someone changes. It is somehow like a nightmare to see someone change in front of your eyes, to become a stranger and not to be able, with just your love, to make them that familiar person again.''
—
Anne Sexton, from a letter to Frederick Morgan written c. May 1960


''She was, you know. She was in love. It was more than real. She was in love with ancestral spirits, dancing witches, gentle ghosts''
—
Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg tr. by George Schoolfield, from “Spring-Joy,”


''I have a childish hope to gather all I love together and sit down beside and smile.''
—
Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Mrs. Bowles written c. January 1858


…two bodies in love with each other, in love deep within their beings, with every atom and cell and nerve, and thought.
—
Anaïs Nin, from “Delta Of Venus,” originally published c. August 1977


''How mad love is – one human being keeping another on tenterhooks and in a state of frantic speculation. Mad, mad. Yet making the world go round of course.''
—
Iris Murdoch, from a letter to Michael Oakeshott written c. December 1958


And though my love did not leave, it went down into deeper darker places.
—
Lidia Yuknavitch, from “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir,” wr. c. 2011


…the loneliness of my body blossoming with you.
—
Halina Poświatowska, tr. by Maya Peretz, from “I Am Dazed by the Beauty of my Body,”


I understood the true fate of Orpheus, that love is a constant terror of loss.
—
Kazimierz Wierzyński, tr. by Czeslaw Milosz, “A Word of Orphists,”


Yet it is true too that my love for you never died, it never got twisted and changed – I never got over you, though I certainly tried to,
—
Iris Murdoch, from a letter to Michael Oakeshott written c. November 1958

