Stag's Leap Quotes

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

Some people think I should be over my ex by now — maybe I thought I might have been over him more by now. Maybe I’m half over who he was, but not who I thought he was, and not over the wound, sudden deathblow as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core of our life together.

each hour is a room of shame, and I am swimming, swimming, holding my head up, smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed, like being naked with the clothed, or being a child, having to try to behave while hating the terms of your life.

let’s part equals, as we were in every bed, pure equals of the earth

He fell in love with her because I didn't suit him anymore - nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he saw it for me.

If I could choose, a place to die,” it would never have been in your arms, old darling

as if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness.

There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All, Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small; A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent, And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.

And you couldn’t say, could you, that the touch you had from me was other than the touch of one who could love for life—whether we were suited or not—for life, like a sentence. And now that I consider, the touch that I had from you became not the touch of the long view, but like the tolerant willingness of one who is passing through.

I've said that he and I had been crazy for each other. But maybe my ex and I were not crazy for each other. Maybe we were sane for each other, as if our desire was almost not even personal - it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there seemed to be no other woman or man in the world.

Cynthia was so furious that evening, she opened a single-vineyard Merlot from Stag’s Leap that she’d been saving, and paired it with a bowl of macaroni and cheese from a box.

And sometimes I feel as if, already, I am not here—

I guess that's how people go on, without knowing how.

I want to relearn the intervals, to journey with a man among the thirds and fifths, augumented, diminshed, with a light touch, sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual adores and dotes - and of course what I reaaly want is some low notes.

So much had become so connected to him that it seemed to belong to him, so that now, flying, for hours, above the Atlantic still felt like being over his realm.

but he does not want to talk about it, he wants a stillness at the end of it.

and my job is to eat the whole car of my anger, part by part, some parts ground down to steel-dust.

Before I turned out the light, he touched my face, then turned away, then the dark.

again, again, unquestioned, not fully seen, not wanting to fully see.

But if feels as if he's not here— though he's here, it feels as if, for me, there's no one there

And slowly he starts to seem more far away, he seems to waft, drift at a distance

Minute by minute, I do not get up and just go to him—

My body may never learn not to yearn for that one

It struck cold awe to my heart, now, to look at who I had been who had thought it was impossible that he or I could touch another.

And no, he does not want to meet again, in a year—when we part, it is with a dry bow and Good-bye.

That moved me so much about you, the way you were a dumbstruck one and yet you seemed to know everything I did not know

I think he loved being loved

We have always been going back, since birth, back toward not being alive.

and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have lost someone who could have loved me for life.

where what cannot be seen is inferred by what the visible does.

I want to say to him, now, What was it like, to love me—when you looked at me, what did you see?

He shows no anger, I show no anger but in flashes of humor, all is courtesy and horror.

I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life.

and there is nothing to be done for it, it can only be known and borne, it cannot be turned into anything fruitful or sweet, but just be faced, as what it was

I feel like his victim, and he seems my victim

If I pass a mirror, I turn away, I do not want to look at her, and she does not want to be seen.

Sometimes I don't see exactly how to go on doing this.

the flesh no one seems now to care to touch.

Have faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.

It is what I do now: not go, not see or touch.

Now I see I've been hoping, each time we meet, that he would praise me for how well I took it, but it's not to be.

I had not put into words, yet—the worst thing, but I thought that I could say it, if I said it word by word.

seeking how to accept him as he was, under the law that he could not speak—and when I shrieked against the law he shrinked down into its absolute, he rose from its departure gate.

If I could choose, a place to die,” it would never have been in your arms, old darling, we figured I'd see you out, in mine

One of us maybe a little too much a hunter, the other a little too polar of affection, polar of summer mysteriousness, magnetic in reticent mourning.

If I ever prayed, as a child, for everlasting union, these were its shoes: one dew-licked kicked-off slipper of a being now flying, one sunrise-milk-green boot of the dead, which I wore, as I dreamed.

and for an instant he's alive toward me, a gem of sea of pond in his eye. Then that retreat into himself, which always moved me, as if there were a sideways gravity, in him, toward some vanishing point.

And to live in those rooms, where one of his smiles might emerge, like something almost from another place, another time, another set of creatures, was to feel blessed, and to be held in mysteriousness, and a little in mourning.

We joked about putting it off, but underneath the joking, grim and hidden, he wanted to leave me, and he was working toward it and against it, maybe worried he could not do it, longing for it and fearing it, and not speaking of it

When he loved me, I looked out at the world as if from inside a profound dwelling, like a burrow or a well, I'd gaze up, at noon, and see Orion shining—when I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breath's time, but for the long continuance

And it entered my strictured heart, this morning, slightly, shyly as if warily, untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness and plenty of his ongoing life, unknown to me, unseen by me, unheard by me, untouched by me, but known by others, seen by others, heard, touched.

What if someone had told me, thirty years ago: If you give up, now, wanting to be an artist, he might love you all your life—what would I have said? I didn't even have an art, it would could from out of our family's life— what could I have said: nothing will stop me.

I am so ashamed before my friends—to be known to be left by the one who supposedly knew me best, each hour is a room of shame, and I am swimming, swimming holding my head up, smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed, like being naked with the clothed, or being a child, having to try to behave while hating the terms of your life.

and love seemed to rest, on us, in a place where, for that hour, it felt death could not reach, and someone was singing in my hearing, without words, that no one can live without reaching death, but I could have lived without having loved almost without reserve, and for a moment, then, I thought I lived forever with him.

When one is much alone one’s vision becomes more extensive; from the tide-wrack rubbish-heap of small bones and dry, crumpled wings, relics of lesser lives, rise images the brighter for being unconfined by the physical eye. From some feathered mummy, stained and thin, soars the spinning lapwing in the white March morning; in the surface crust of rotting weed, where the foot explodes a whirring puff of flies, the withered fins and scales hold still, intrinsically, the sway and dart of glittering shoals among the tide-swung sea-tangle; smothered by the mad parabolic energy of leaping sand-hoppers the broken antlers of a stag re-form and move again high in the bare, stony corries and the October moonlight.

In his gaze, rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog- emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow: he was in there somewhere, I looked for him, and he gave me the gift, he let me in, knowing he would never once, in this world or in any other, have to do it again, and I saw him, not as he really was, I was still without the strength of anger, but I saw him see me, even now that dropping down into trust's affection in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet, and I said, Good-bye, and he said Good-bye

Lying sprawled uncouthly at the foot of the Red Dragon where the men had tumbled him down, there was a certain splendor about him still. An old man, an old giant, with bright hairs that shone like gold wires in the gray jut of his beard and the mane of wild hair outflung about his head. I recognized him first by the earl's bracelet twisted about his sword arm, for a spear had taken him between the eyes, but as I looked down more closely into the smashed and blood-pooled face, I recognized the cunning iron-bound mouth, drawn back now in a frozen snarl. I recognized above all, I think the greatness that seemed to cling about him still, an atmosphere of the thing that had made him a giant in more than body; this ancient enemy of Ambrosius's. Hengest, the Jutish adventurer who had grown to be a war lord of the Saxon hordes, lying flung down like a tribute at the foot of the British standard that stirred faintly in the night air above him. That left the son and the grandson to deal with. 'So-o,' Bedwyr said softly. 'Earl Hengest goes at last to his own Storm Lords again. He should have died on a night of tempest, with the lightning leaping from hill to hill, not on a still summer evening with the scent of hawthorn in the air.' 'He was a royal stag,' I said. 'Thank God he is dead.

He took off running. The muscles in his back shifted as he leaped down the short flight of stairs and bounded into the garden, as spry and swift as a stag. Within seconds he was gone.

Love only where loved! O newborn suit with a smiling worm over the heart, it is forbidden to love where we are not loved.

 "...a large white stag leaped onto the road in front of Johann. Deer often roamed the grassy fields along the forest’s edge, but the youth had never seen one like this before, one so magnificent. Its sapphire eyes stared until they locked on his, drawing him into a vastness unfathomed, stirring in him a desire for something more. Something adventurous and exciting. Extraordinary or even supernatural. A longing for truths yet unknown.

in a sky whose darkness is fading, that first dream, from which I am now waking.

Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into every reach

He lived so enclosed in himself, he seemed alive not exactly like others, but hibernating

I called for him through solid earth until he woke, and left.

Once, each summer, I howl, and draw myself back, out of there

Then every scene I thought of I visited accompanied by a death-spirit, everything was chilled with it, each time I woke, I lay in dreading bliss to feel and hear him sigh and snore.

It's so quiet, and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape, a ground without a figure.

and some young men loved them the way one would want, oneself, to be loved.

And they do not know language, they are waiting for him

refreshing to live with, beings without the knowledge of death, creatures of ignorant suffering.

Sleep and dream—but not of his return.

it was never in doubt that you had suffered more than I when young.

and farther into cold fog I let him go, I lay and stretched on love's fucking stretcher, and let him wander on his own the haunt salt mazes.

The glacierscape called it up, the silent, shining tulle, the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems and corollaries, that girl who had thought a wedding promise was binding as a law of physics.

And then there is the spring park, damp as if freshly peeled, sweet greenhouse, green cemetery with no dead in it—except, in some shaded woods, under some years of leaves and rotted cones, the body of a warbler like a whole note fallen from the sky—my old love for him, like a songbird's rib cage picked clean.

I had not remembered how deep he held himself inside himself

casting himself off a cliff in his fervor to get free of me.

Maybe I’m half over who he was, but not who I thought he was, and not over the wound, sudden deathblow as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core of our life together.

A week later, I said to a friend: I don't think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

and I could tell her the best of my poor, partial love, I could sing her out, with it, I saw the luck and the luxury of that hour.

Now I come to look at love in a new way, now that I know I'm not standing in its light.

a heart's spurt of rage.

I always feared this would happen, I thought it would be a pure horror, but it's just home

as he soars from the precipice edge, dreamy.

When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver.

In me now there's a being of sheer hate, like an angel of hate.

But look! I am starting to give him up! I believe he is not coming back. Something has died, inside me, believing that

The other dreams inside a constellation

God-bye, for the rest of this life and for the long nothing.

he is like an icon, he is like a fantasy. I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

I lived alongside him, in his hush and reserve

But now it was time to go beyond comfort, to part.

Are you as happy as you thought you'd be, I ask. Yes. And his smile is touchingly pleased. I thought you'd look happier, I say, but after all, when I am looking at you, you're with me!

He was so handsome it was kind of adorable when he looked horrible.

I thought wherever we were, we were in lasting love— even in our separateness and loneliness, in love

I was not the one he wanted to rise from or return to

It is in the past, enough looking back, it is gone, it is more over with than the shocks of childhood.

I idolized it without reserve, caution, or limit, I adored it with an unprotected joy.