Longing and Absence
Emily Jane Brontë
And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
Caio Valério Catulo
What a woman says to an eager lover, / write it on running water, write it on air.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.
William S. Merwin
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Dear as remember’d kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. O, well for the fisherman’s boy, That he shouts with his sister at play! O, well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O, for the touch of a vanish’d hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!
Alfred Lord Tennyson
And o’er the hills and far away Beyond their utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, across the day, Through all the world she followed him.
Abraham Lincoln
Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.