Love letters from famous writers

I gotta say, if you’re a writer, a love letter is a tall order. There are expectations involved. I wrote my own vows when I got married last month, and my now-husband did the same. His friends told him he was crazy to attempt such a thing, since stringing words together is my daily life. As if wedding vows are a competitive affair. But, you know what? His were better. And I’m not just saying that to be a cute newlywed. I keep them in my day planner and they still make me blush.

Here are a few excerpts from love letters of famous writers (from this Huffington Post article). Enjoy.

From Dylan Thomas to Caitlin Thomas
Dylan claims to have loved his wife Caitlin at first sight, and to have proposed upon their first meeting.

“I want you to be with me; you can have the spaces between the houses, and I can have the room with no windows; we’ll make a halfway house; you can teach me to walk in the air and I’ll teach you to make nice noises on the piano without any music; we’ll have a bed in a bar, as we said we would, and we shan’t have any money at all and we’ll live on other people’s, which they won’t like one bit. The room’s full of they now, but I don’t care, I don’t care for anybody. I want to be with you because I love you. I don’t know what I love you means, except that I do.”
Read the entire letter here

From Virginia Woolf to Vita Stackville-West
Vita, the partial subject of Woolf’s Orlando, was Woolf’s close friend. The two shared a brief, passionate relationship as well.

“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river.”
Read more of the letter on Brain Pickings

From John Keats to Fanny Browne
Keats and Brawne were betrothed from 1818 until his death in 1821.

“…write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
Read the entire letter on poets.org

From Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas
Wilde and Douglas had a tumultuous affair peppered with frequent break ups and reconciliations.

“Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.”
Read the entire letter on Thought Catalog

From Henry Miller to Anais Nin
Miller and Nin had a tumultuous, years-long affair in Paris.

“Anais, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that’s in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don’t find them — not any.”
Read the entire letter on Letters of Note

>> Read more love letters here