"A mountain keeps an echo deep inside. That's how I hold your voice."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees."
— Victor Hugo

"It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely, no part left out."
— Izumi Shikibu

"…the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain–I find no sea room—but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore. "
— Henry David Thoreau

"Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
— James Joyce

"We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well…How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
— Paul Bowles

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from "capsizing"! Let us then continue our voyage—each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun—what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather!"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves."
— Albert Einstein

""No, I don't think I will kiss you, although you need kissing, badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how." "
— Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind)

"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words but to pour them all out, just as it is, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keeping what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away."
— George Eliot

"If it were not for hopes, the heart would break."
— Thomas Fuller

"That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us."
— Pablo Neruda

"Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you."
— Walt Whitman

"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. I miss you like hell."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life."
— Walt Whitman

"may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone."
— e.e. cummings

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. "
— Andrew Wyeth

"Becky walked to the sea late in the day, trod barefoot among the tumbled blocks of stone that lined the foreshore, smelling the old harsh smell of salt, hearing the water slap and chuckle while from high above came the endless sinister trickling of the cliffs. Into her consciousness stole, maybe for the first time, the sense of loneliness; an oppression born of the gentle miles of summer water, the tall blackness of the headlands, the fingers of the stone ledges pushing out into the sea."
— Keith Roberts (Pavane)

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and we kissed too sweet, and howled just as loud as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight."
— Pearl Cleage

"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you."
— Isadora Duncan

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind."
— Katherine Mansfield

""You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.""
— David Mamet

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines."
— Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield)

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years!"
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?'"
— Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)

"If I really wanted to pray I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field alone or into the deep, deep woods, and I'd look up into the sky - up - up - up- into that lovely blue sky that looks like there's no end to it's blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer."
— L.M. Montgomery

"I don't remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don't remember
if I'm here alone
or waiting for someone."
— Leonard Cohen (Book of Longing)

"Is not a kiss the very autograph of love?"
— Henry Finch

"...At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company."
— George Gordon Byron

"If you can't fix it, you have to stand it."
— Annie Proulx