lonliness

"I have found the constant, everlasting weather of man's life to be, not love, but loneliness. Love itself is not the weather of our lives. It is the rare, the precious flower."

- Thomas Wolfe

"I'm afraid that you'll never understand me fully, and because of that, sometimes you'll be frightened, disgusted, annoyed, or pleased... The thing that makes me different from all of you is the vast inner life I have, and inner life, concerned with, of all things, externals... The bigger and deeper this inner life grows, the less anyone of you will understand me... Until I find a way to unleash the inner-life in art-method, nothing about me will be clear."

- Jack Keroauc, from a letter to Allen Ginsberg, September 1945

The Albatross

Often, when bored, the sailors of the crew
Trap Albatross, the great birds of the seas,
Mild travellers escorting in the blue
Ships gliding on the ocean's mysteries.

And when the sailors have them on the planks,
Hurt and distraught, these kings of all outdoors
Piteously let trail along their flanks
Their great white wings, dragging like useless oars.

This voyager, how comincal and weak!
Once handsome, how unseemly and inept!
One sailor pokes a pipe into his beak,
Another mocks the flier's hobbled step.

The poet is a kinsman of the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way

- Charles Baudelaire, from 'Flowers of Evil'

(Ah, the persecuted poet!)

But in the room of the banished poet
Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,
and the night is coming on,
which has no hope of dawn.

- Anna Akhmatova, from 'You Will Hear Thunder'