“I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.”

To Felice Bauer From Franz Kafka

“I think of you once against a sky line: and on the hill that Sunday morning. The light and the shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice and you.”

To Taatamata From Rupert Brooke

“You might drop your heart into me and you’d never hear it touch bottom.“

Written to Maata Mahupuku From Katherine Mansfield

“Dearest,my body is simply crazy with wanting you…I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours-the kisses-the hotness-the wetness-all melting together-the being held so tight that it hurts-the strangle and the struggle.”

To Alfred Stieglitz From Georgia O’Keefe

“I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me ‘Dear.’ I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs.”

To Nora Barnacle from James Joyce

“The fire and excitement may be gone now that we don’t go out there and sing them anymore, but the ring of fire still burns around you and I, keeping our love hotter than a pepper sprout.”

To June Carter from Johnny Cash

“I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips.”

To Florence Harding from Warren Harding

“Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude.”

To Virginia Woolf from Vita Sackville-West