“I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.”

I love tranquil solitude.

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won.

There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

The jealous keys of truth’s eternal doors.

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes – are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry.

All love is sweet Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever.

Heaven’s ebon vault Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead – When the cloud is scattered The rainbow’s glory is shed.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Now I know being close to you was never about the proximity.

My brother and I ended up being known for our distance, but we had no idea how far we could hit the ball because we hit it the same, and all of a sudden.

The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance.

The distance from you is measured in how far I’ve come.

I know there is a terrible distance between us. But our bodies are made of stardust, and we are hurtling through space and time, toward the most beautiful collision.

Souls do not have calendars or clocks, nor do they understand the notion of time or distance. They only know it feels right to know one other.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.