Hi ! I was wondering if you had quotes / thoughts about feeling lost in life, when nothing feels right and choices have to be made even though they all feel like lukewarm water when you wanted a hot bath. That feeling of losing a sense of grounding and not seeing the direction in which to move. thank you xx
(I’ve been wanting to compile this from the moment I received your ask in my inbox. I know the feeling intimately, and I love the way you articulated it. Hope any of these quotes resonate w what you were looking for xx)
“What shall we do my darling, when trial grows more, and more, when the dim, lone light expires, and it’s dark, so very dark, and we wander, and know not where, and cannot get out of the forest…”
—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
“She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.”
—Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (tr. Benjamin Moser)
“But as it is / I lack myself.”
—Anne Carson, Grief Lessons; “Herakles”
“Even now I can’t explain. Something happened, a kind of earthquake that shook everything and I lost faith and touch with everybody.”
—Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield
“She felt suddenly as if she were a ghost in her own life—”
—Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden
“I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half of my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can’t stop it, but I know I’m not really going to be hurt and yet time is so long and even a second goes on and on and I could stand any of it if I could only surrender—”
—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
“It makes me tremble. (…) To think back. I remember exactly how I thought life would be.”
—Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband
Emily Dickinson, “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”
“and I didn’t care / and I was alone / and there had been war / and that thing (my soul) / was a lost star / or a lost boat / adrift,”
—H.D., Child Poems: “Dedication”
“She had a perpetual sense (…), of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
“You know the feeling? One lies in a kind of daze, feeling so sensitive—so unbearably sensitive to the exterior world and longing for something ‘lovely’ to happen.”
—Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield
“I don’t care a bit—about anything—I just seem to be asleep and can’t wake up—”
—Georgia O’Keeffe, Art and Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe
“Life is what happens to someone else; / I stand on the sidelines and wring my hands.”
—Lisel Mueller, Waving from Shore
“…it is a little thing to say how lone it is — anyone can do it, but to wear loneliness next to your heart for weeks, when you sleep, and when you wake, ever missing something, this, all cannot say, and it baffles me.”
—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
“My life now is a dream too, semi-detached, and seems to happen to somebody else.”
—Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters
“I don’t know—I don’t know anything. There is no one here I can talk to—it’s all like a bad dream.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe, Art and Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe
“…she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to not be abandoned.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
“I had lost my true rhythm. But what was my true rhythm?”
—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol 1, 1931-1934
“People kept saying It’s only a matter of time so I persevered in the hope they weren’t lying. At the same time beginning to think I might’ve been lying to myself. Wasting everyone’s time with fantasies of this career I couldn’t have. The person I could never be. There was just so much rejection and not enough of me. I got so afraid. And I lost my nerve—”
—Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians
—Denise Levertov, Life in the Forest; “A Daughter (I)”
“I’m not lost. Or not lost much. Lonely. It is that and … I don’t know what to do. So I move. And cars move. And it’s almost life.”
—Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians
“What prevents you? The future. The future tense, / immense as outer space. / You could get lost there. / No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density / and drowned events pressing you down, / like sea water—”
“What is there to say? I became physically ill. It was as if I had fallen into space and hung there while life passed me by.”
—Boris Pasternak, Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke
“And nothing else happens. The days go by, lost, wasted, and I have no drive to write, no words come… And I grow more and more solitary.”
—Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters
“I cannot write anymore, dears. Though it is many nights, my mind never comes home.”
—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
“As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ has started invading me like ivy on a wall.”
—Clarice Lispector, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
“There’s a loss of personality. / Or rather, you’ve lost touch with the person / You thought you were. / You no longer feel quite human.”
—T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
“My wings are cut and I can-not fly I can-not fly I can-not fly.”
—Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield
—Anne Carson, Decreation; “Despite her Pain, Another Day”
“…and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
—Emily Dickinson, Letters
“…why this doubt that I have about everything I do, this void that frightens me, all these lost illusions?”
—Gustave Flaubert, Intimate Notebook 1840-1841
“What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is quietly killing me. Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.”
—Jeanette Winterson, “The Green Man”
“Around. Around. There / should have been / a lesson somewhere.”
—Louise Glück, “The Game”
“Only occasionally do I find I have to break my peace: shout or be lost in the shuffle. But mostly I am lost in the shuffle.”
—Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
“Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. I recognize how that she was feeling then as I feel now. Invisible on the street.”
—Joan Didion, Blue Nights
“She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown;”
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
“You might not remember me, dears. I cannot recall myself. I thought I was strongly built, but this stronger has undermined me.”
—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
“I have no world to go back into, or to go forward into. Because these years have cut me away from many things – from everything: not only materially, but also mentally, spiritually.”
—Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters
—Rita Dove, “The Venus of Willendorf”
“…for we are in such fragile skin, so close to getting lost in the in-between.”
—Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians
“I do not want revenge, I do not want expiation. / I only want to ask someone / how I was lost, / how I was lost,”
—Margaret Atwood, “Owl Song”
“I felt as if the sky was torn off my life. I had no home in goodness anymore.”
—Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
“Let it be over, she pleaded within herself. Let it never have happened—any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
“The ultimate fantasy: the recovery of an irrecoverable past. But if I could daydream about an invented happy future…”
—Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
“Tell me what’s the difference / between hope and waiting / because my heart doesn’t know / It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting / It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope”
—Anna Kamienska, Astonishments
—Denise Levertov, To Stay Alive
“I long to—ah, so much!! If that were possible I’d get back to my spirit.”
—Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters
“I told my Soul to sing— / She said her Strings were snapt—”
—Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems; “The first Day’s Night had come,”
“Surely it is a privilege to approach the end / still believing in something.”
—Louise Glück, Averno; “October”
“There is a wild raging river flowing inside of me. I can’t dam it. I’m hurt so badly. Believe me—oh shit! Believe, believe—what’s there to believe anymore?”
— Henry Miller, A Literate Passion
“And life tasteless. And so eager, so eager that I should accomplish a miracle. People always expect miracles.”
—Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion
“I want to be filled with longing again / till dark burn marks show on my skin. I want to be written again / in the Book of Life, to be written every single day / till the writing hand hurts.”
—Yehuda Amichai,“I Walked Past a House Where I Lived Once,”
“I want / my heart back / I want to feel everything again—”
—Louise Glück, Averno; “Blue Rotunda”
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