“You don’t meet the people you love, you recognize them.”
― Anna Gavalda, “Life, Only Better” , trans. Tina Kover
“You and I know each other in our bones”
― Kurt Vonnegut, from a letter to Nanny Vonnegut
“but everyone had this patina
of slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of
I think I knew you when we were children,
this look of I’ve loved you ever since you
and probably longer than that”
― Paul Hostovsky, from “Everyone was Beautiful,” Dear Truth (Main Street Rag, 2009)
“He’s been here in my heart before I even knew him. Understand? He’s always been here. Always.”
― Sandra Cisneros , from Woman at Hollering Creek: Stories; “Never Marry a Mexican,”
“You came into my life–not as one comes to visit…but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps…”
— Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to Véra Slonim (1923), Letters to Véra
“I love you. I feel as though we were never strangers, you and I, not even for a moment.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Mathilde Trampedach
“Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”
“Here when I say “I never want to be without you,”
somewhere else I am saying
“I never want to be without you again.” And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet in all of the lives we are,
it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.
— Bob Hicok, Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem
“She said that she had been searching for my eyes in the crowd because she felt as if she were talking to my heart.”
— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name,” published c. 1982
“Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening…”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from You who never arrived (tr. by Stephen Mitchell); Uncollected Poems: 1913–1918