do you have any posts on saying 'I love you'? a little more specifically on a hesitation or struggle to use those words and their bigness...if that makes sense
“Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.”
— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West
“I’m sorry I cannot say I love you when you say
you love me. The words, like moist fingers,
appear before me full of promise but then run away
to a narrow black room that is always dark,
where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,
devouring the thing I feel. I want the force
of attraction to crush the force of repulsion
and my inner and outer worlds to pierce
one another, like a horse whipped by a man.
I don’t want words to sever me from reality.
I don’t want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured in a bowl.”
— Henri Cole, “Gravity and Center”
— Sufjan Stevens, “Futile Devices”
“Do you remember the way the girls
would call out "love you!"
conveniently leaving out the "I"
as if they didn't want to commit
to their own declarations.
I agree that the "I" is a pretty heavy concept.”
— David Berman, ‘Self-Portrait At 28′
“You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves
you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself
a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy,
and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to
choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and
he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your
heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you
don't even have a name for.”
— Richard Siken, ‘You Are Jeff’
“Because my love for you
Is higher than words,
I have decided to fall silent.”
— Nizar Qabbani, from The Book of Love (Untitled Poem #4)
— Emma (2020), dir. Autumn de Wilde
“More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street — which was, of course, I love you.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
“What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds.”
— Katherine Mansfield, excerpt from a letter
— Margaret Atwood, “We Are Hard”
“...and I want to tell you something,
come close I want to whisper it, to pour
the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you,
listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober,
while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass,
while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay,
give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop,
I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up.”
— Kim Addonizio, from “Glass”
“I never call your name, but you are in me like the song in the nightingale’s throat even when it’s not singing.”
— Dulce María Loynaz, “LVII”
“…forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — “
— Emily Dickinson, letter to Susan Gilbert
— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
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