“I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.”
– Vita Sackville-West’s love letter to Virginia Woolf
Words ... for the Time Being 
holy shit M-Fjesus damn etc.etc.etc….
You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.”
man. MAN!
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So you liked it then?
😉
“I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it.”
Ooph!
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I love that you keep highlighting pieces I wish I would have written myself.
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Robert Fulghum (he wrote the All I Needed to Know…Kindergarten book) compiled a book of his favorite passages and titled it “Words I Wish I Wrote.” I wish I had written that title first, lol.
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Even when I’m not entirely present you and I are riding the same wave length of thought. Last summer I got to fulfill a decades-old desire to walk in Vita’s garden. I got to stand in her study and read some of her letters –actual, behind-glass, once-touched-by-Vita. There are so many words I wish I’d written. Don’t we all wish for that?
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