When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone Quotes

“and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward the kingdom of strangers,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.”
― Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

“When the man touches through
to the exact center of the woman,
he lies motionless, in equilibrium,
in absolute desire, at the threshold
of the world to which the Creator Spirit
knows the pass-whisper, and whispers it,
and his loving friend becomes his divinity.”
― Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

“Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft.”
― Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

“When the lover goes,
the vow though broken remains,
that trace of eternity love
brings down among us stays,
to give dignity to the suffering
and to intensify it.”
― Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

“When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.”
― Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone