Quotes About Connection

Now he is gone as you are gone. But he belongs to me like lost baggage.

And there you are. And I liked you a lot today. A lot. And I want to talk to you. Selfishly.

I am, to be sure, afraid that if you knew me that you wouldn't love me. But this must be faced…I fear it in any relationship. Thus I am perhaps afraid to reveal facts about things…or to say too much for fear if I make too much noise you'll drift away, pull down the shade of your ivory tower…and after that. Afraid, I guess, that I'll loose you…I keep losing people.

Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.

Clover['s] eyes are full of language.

I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.

Am I to bless the lost you, sitting here with my clumsy soul?

And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.

I don't know if I can go on spilling myself out to people—those strange strangers.

Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.

Someone is dead.  Even the trees know it

For all you who are going, and there are many who are climbing their pain, many who will be painted out with a black ink suddenly and before it is time, for these many I say, awkwardly, clumsily, take off your life like trousers, your shoes, your underwear, then take off your flesh, unpick the lock of your bones. In other words take off the wall that separates you from God.

Your hands found me like an architect.

Language is verbalizing the non-verbal. (That's what makes it so complicated.) Holding hands is better than saying "I love you.

I love you. I wish we were real. — Anne Sexton, from a letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, 28 March 1963, A Self-Portrait in Letters, eds. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

Tonight the landscape is fired by moonlight and I am thinking of you somehow.

You're the lily and I'm the bee that gets inside.

As you know, both Maxine and I like Saul Bellow. It is even hard to dislike parts of his work that one might in some one else. I like Henderson the most.

I have been her kind.

I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said … but did not.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.