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Love2
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“A youth with his first cigar makes himself sick; a youth with his first girl makes other people sick.”
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“I prefer not to have among my guests two people or more, of any sex, who are in the first wild tremors of love. It is better to invite them after their new passion has settled, has solidified into a quieter reciprocity of emotions. (It is also a waste of good food, to serve it to new lovers.)”
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“Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring.”
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“It was the kind of desperate, headlong, adolescent calf love that he should have experienced years ago and got over.”
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“First loves are not necessarily more foolish than others; but the chances are certainly against them. Proximity of time or place, a variety of accidental circumstances more than the essential merits of the object, often produce what is called first love.”
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“First love is an astounding experience and if the object happens to be totally unworthy and the love not really love at all, it makes little difference to the intensity or the pain.”
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“Young and in love — how magical the phrase! / How magical the fact! Who has not yearned / Over young lovers when to their amaze / They fall in love and find their love returned ...”
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“Everything is quite different in my life because of boys! I absolutely like one now. I guess he likes me, too. This diary is to keep track of how things go, so I can analyze the best way of making certain he likes me. He sure acts like he doesn't, which is a good sign.”
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“Love, supreme power of the heart, mysterious enthusiasm that encloses in itself all poetry, all heroism, all religion!”
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“If you love the wrong people it's still love, isn't it, no matter what kind of love ...”
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“Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.”
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“Like most people, I'm indignant when I'm not loved and astonished when I am.”
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“There is no question for which / you are not the answer.”
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“Love is going to replace life and from then on it's all smooth sailing. Love will replace life.”
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“he is a country / i never / want to leave.”
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“Love is light, warmth and comfort. Understanding is just light.”
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“I slept in my clothes / last night / just so you'll know / I think of you / sleeping in yours.”
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“... the beginning of my history is — love. It is the beginning of every man and every woman's history, if they are only frank enough to admit it.”
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“If you loved, sooner or later you always lost; that was the penalty you had to pay for loving. Grief can be endured — somehow. But how poor and bare would be a life which had nothing to grieve over!”
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“... love, if it be love indeed, asks no permission as to where it shall seek vantage ground or gain its victory — it is of all powers the most unfettered and the one which takes the widest course of largest liberty ...”
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“It is not so difficult to win love as to keep it!”
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“Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!”
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“The medicine this sick world needs so badly is love.”
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“I am possessed by love and have no options.”
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“Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.”
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“I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.”
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“To sit together drinking the blue ocean / And eating the sun like a fruit.”
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“... the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. And believing in ghosts — that's believing that love never dies. If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.”
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“Perfect love casteth out awkwardness.”
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“... neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone ... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: all psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.”
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“... falling in love is not an abrupt plunge; it is a gradual descent, seldom in a straight line, rather like the floating downward of a parachute. And the expression is imperfect because while one may fall one also levitates.”
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“When men are just desserts — that is, when a man is an enhancement to the already complete and satisfying life of a woman who makes choices and takes action — you will be able to choose a partner without surrendering who you are. Most of all, when men are just desserts, you may choose to be in the arms of a man, but need never fear falling into his hands.”
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“... she did observe, with some dismay, that, far from conquering all, love lazily sidestepped practical problems ...”
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“No one worth possessing / Can be quite possessed.”
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“Old love, old love, / How can I be true? / Shall I be faithless to myself / Or to you?”
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“When you can't see any reason for loving a person, you must be loving him as a symbol of something, don't you think so?”
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“... we cannot be sure if we are loving God, although we may have good reasons for believing that we are, but we can know quite well if we are loving our neighbor. And be certain that, the farther advanced you find you are in this, the greater the love you will have for God ...”
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“The important thing is not to think much but to love much; do, then, whatever most arouses you to love.”
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“How do you know that love is gone? If you said you would be there at seven, you get there by nine and he or she has not called the police yet — it's gone.”
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“Habit: Often mistaken for love.”
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“Love for the joy of loving, and not for the offerings of someone else's heart.”
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“... while it is a misfortune to a woman never to be loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.”
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“A man likes to feel that he is loved, a woman likes to be told.”
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“As if by magic, the love of the many comes with the love of the one.”
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“After the door of a woman's heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it.”
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“It is possible for a spinster to be disappointed in lovers, but only the married are ever disappointed in love.”
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“There is always one way to make anybody do anything — the trouble is to find it.”
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“Pedestals are always lonely.”
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“Love is an orchid which thrives principally on hot air.”
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“... there are very few important moments in a lifetime. To see coming toward you the face that will mean an end of oneness is — far more than birth itself — the beginning of life.”
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“Love's greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred.”
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“Love is the magician of the universe. It creates everything out of nothing.”
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“One fancies that what one loves cannot die.”
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“... knowledge is the beginning of love.”
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“... it was a great holiness, a religion, as all great loves must be.”
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“Free love is too expensive.”
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“Love is the falling rain, / Love is the following flood, / And love is the ark / With two of a kind aboard ...”
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“When one loves in a certain way, even betrayals become unimportant ...”
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“... friendship, which is of its nature a delicate thing, fastidious, slow of growth, is easily checked, will hesitate, demur, recoil where love, good old blustering love, bowls ahead and blunders through every obstacle.”
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“One of the best things about love is just recognizing a man's step when he climbs the stairs.”
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“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath — a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff — he's always, always in my mind — not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself — but as my own being ...”
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“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same ...”
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“I cannot live without my life!”
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“Love is like the wild rose-briar; / Friendship like the holly-tree. / The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, / But which will bloom most constantly?”
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“The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.”
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“To be in love / Is to touch things with a lighter hand.”
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“Love has the quality of informing almost everything — even one's work.”
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“The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few.”
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“Like shipboard romances and summer flirtations, college attachments are often impermanent romances, used to lighten the tedium of classroom and laboratory grind.”
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“There is always an element of pity in love.”
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“Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.”
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“Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.”
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“There were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed at all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house.”
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“She didn't know that on the wild nights no one can call you home except the one who knows your name.”
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“Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”
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“Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation.”
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“Why is the measure of love loss?”
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“However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very pleasing experience.”
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“Love is like the measles; the older you are when it hits you, the harder it takes. Cheer up, you won't die of it.”
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“... love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.”
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“... love is so very subtle an essence, such an indefinable metaphysical marvel, that its due force, though very cruelly felt by the sufferer himself, is never clearly understood by those who look on at its torments and wonder why he takes the common fever so badly.”
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“When love is out of your life, you're through in a way. Because while it is there it's like a motor that's going, you have such vitality to do things, big things, because love is goosing you all the time.”
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“Without love it is like having a good song without an audience.”
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“I think love is like a card trick. After you know how it works, it's no fun any more.”
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“... I never liked the men I loved, and never loved the men I liked.”
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“But sometimes the very things you fall in love with people for, become the things you like least about them, in the end.”
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“Those who would know much, and love little, will ever remain at but the beginning of a godly life.”
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“Anyone one loves is a potential enemy ...”
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“Every heart desires a mate.”
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“... it is the way of lovers to think that none can bless or succour their love but their own selves. And there is a touch of truth in it, maybe more than a touch.”
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“... love was like that — a lot of coloured threads, and one master-thread of pure gold.”
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“Love unspoken is the most tremendous force in the world. One is amazed at the way in which people waste their time making speeches, agitating, praying, even. They might save their breath. The great lovers of the world, in silence, rule the world.”
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“There are no love songs for wives. Only for lost loves, unrequited love, 'I'll see you again whenever spring breaks through again' loves, foggy day in London Town loves, sneaking out in the middle of the night to go to Santa Fe loves, never any here and now, ring on the finger loves.”
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“I've got a heart like a college prom. Each one I dance with seems the best of all.”
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“One can really love only once.”
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“... love is the greatest beautifier in the universe.”
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“He said he would love me like a revolution, like a religion.”
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“Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe — the open sesame to every soul.”
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“I would like to be the air / that inhabits you for a moment / only. I would like to be that unnoticed / & that necessary.”
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“... nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”
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“They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.”
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“Love is the image of ourself until ourself destroys us.”
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“I loved my images far more than you ...”
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“A fish swims in my lung. Without you, / what is there to celebrate?”
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“... children had no place in love affairs. Children ought to be born to widows and old maids.”
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“That's what falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs. Adrenaline and dopamine, oxytocin and rotonin. Chemical insanity celebrated by poets.”
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“Love, is it? First you lose your appetite, then you lose your tongue, then you take leave of your senses, and that's love!”
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“When there's love enough you can stand anything. When there isn't, you can stand nothing. Living together every day you find out a lot you didn't know, and love can't keep still. It's got to grow or die.”
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“Oh, what a dear ravishing thing is the beginning of an Amour!”
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“Love's a thin Diet, nor will keep out Cold.”
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“Whoever said love is blind is dead wrong. Love is the only thing that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.”
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“I wonder why you care so much about me — no, I don't wonder. I only accept it as the thing at the back of all one's life that makes everything bearable and possible. But it is a singular thing to be sure.”
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“At last love has come. I would be more ashamed / to hide it in cloth than leave it naked.”
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“... you couldn't talk yourself into love any more than you could talk yourelf out of it.”
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“... love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.”
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“Love is ... the bite into bread again.”
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“Love can never explain the loved one, my dear. It is the essence of wild unreason.”
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“True love is abnegation of self and in the relation of the sexes it is inappropriate. The sacrifices made to a very young child impose upon it none of the burden of obligation which an adult must feel in similar circumstances.”
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“I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth.”
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“... love at any age takes everything you've got.”
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“Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.”
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“Caring can cost a lot, but not caring always costs more.”
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“The dream of romantic love is taken more seriously in North America than it is anywhere else in the world, which is why we believe in fidelity and why we believe in infidelity as well. It is also, of course, what makes our divorce rate as high as it is. Falling in love at first sight and instant gratification are part of the world in which we live, so there are people who believe adamantly in fidelity. They just don't believe in it for long.”
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“Our times are obsessed with finding fulfillment, so there are times when some people try too hard, and there are people who want to have the newest feelings just as there are those who want to have the latest model car. You can't play at love any more than you can be proud of your humility, or add water to your perfume and have it smell the same, but men and women both have been known to try.”
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“Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.”
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“We all need to learn a new language for love — a language that speaks not in socks, pancakes, and paychecks, but in shared fascination with physics or poetry, delight in each other's uniqueness, and mutual practical and emotional support.”
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“They know after all this time about love — that it's dim and unreliable and little more than a reflection on the wall. It is also capricious, idiotic, sentimental, imperfect and inconstant, and most often seems to be the exclusive preserve of others.”
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“... romances and marriages are usually over long before they are over.”
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“Each one of us thinks our experience of love is different from everybody else's.”
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“There are two sorts of romantics: those who love, and those who love the adventure of loving.”
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“Love is a bridge — even across — death.”
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“Love in its early stages rarely maintains a level, it always seems to be growing or diminishing.”
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“But love and disease are both like electricity, Weetzie thought. They are always there — you can't see or smell or hear, touch, or taste them, but you know they are there like a current in the air. We can choose, Weetzie thought, we can choose to plug into the love current instead.”
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“Love is a dangerous angel ... Especially nowadays.”
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“... love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.”
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“My love: you make me permanent / like old unlovely clay relics / unearthed in the Egypt / of the ancient dead.”
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“After love a formal feeling comes.”
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“In love there are two things — bodies and words.”
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“I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.”
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“When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season ...”
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“We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.”
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“... shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.”
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“... love and life cannot help but marry and stay married with an exhausting violence of fidelity.”
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“Falling in love is like religious conversion. It goes on for a long time below the threshold before it reaches consciousness.”
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“It is said that people learn to hate each other because of little things ... not big ones. I know I have always learned to love because of little things ... I'm not at all sure that there are any big ones.”
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“Engagements — they are like a prayer before eating, best quick.”
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“Love has a tide!”
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“There is no love that rewards with more consistency and provides lifelong passion as the love one has for the world.”
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“Love, for both of them, had ceased to be a journey, an adventure, an essay of hope. It had become an infection, a ritual, a drama with a bloody last act, and they could both foresee the final carnage.”
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“Human contact seemed to her so frail a thing that the hope that two people might want each other in the same way, at the same time and with the possibility of doing something about it, seemed infinitely remote.”
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“If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.”
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“I think I'm a love agnostic — not sure, one way or another, if it really exists.”
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“When I am dead, I am certain that the imprint of my love will be found on my heart. It is impossible to worship as I do without leaving some visible trace behind when life is over.”
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“There are no wrinkles in the heart and you will see my face only in the reflection of your attachment, eh, Victor, my beloved?”
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“The talk we had last night kept me from sleeping, but I do not complain; there are moments when sleep is a misfortune.”
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“I must have true love or nothing.”
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“... I could dispense with life sooner than with your love.”
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“I love you because I love you, because it would be impossible for me not to love you. I love you without question, without calculation, without reason good or bad, faithfully, with all my heart and soul, and every faculty.”
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“... I see only you, think only of you, speak only to you, touch only you, breathe you, desire you, dream of you; in a word, I love you!”
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“A fire that no longer blazes is quickly smothered in ashes. Only a love that scorches and dazzles is worthy of the name. Mine is like that.”
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“... love is always in danger of being sentimentalized.”
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“Intense love is often akin to intense suffering ...”
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“Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, / Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?”
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“Every one who is loved has lost the right to die.”
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“Maybe I shall never achieve happiness, but one thing I have had — the terrible wisdom of love.”
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“But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of the chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none.”
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“Love understands love; it needs no talk.”
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“Love is the miracle we are all looking for.”
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“Heavens, what a wide Sea of Perplexities do we launch into, when once we embark in Love! Hopes and Fears, immortal Transports, or distracting Horrors, divide our Hours, and lift us to the Skies, or sink us down to Hell; Tranquility is for ever fled, and the Position of our very Souls is changed. — Yet let me never know Indifference more.”
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“The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.”
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“Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud — well down — and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like — like Rasputin.”
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“... one pities most those who loved, and still died. Only those who love, dread death.”
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“... 'tis better to have loved and lust than never to have loved at all.”
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“Nothing is lost, for all in love survive.”
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“Love is not a doctrine. Peace is not an international agreement. Love and Peace are beings who live as possibilities in us.”
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“I've discovered that love grows exponentially, the more you give, the more there is.”
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“[At age 80, she was asked when a woman has done with love:] Ask someone older.”
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“Are we not like two volumes of one book?”
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“... that person is lonely who has no one for whom he or she is Number One.”
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“Love works miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favoring the passions, destroying reason, and, in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy.”
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“Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.”
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“When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it a marriage.”
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“Being in love is better than being in jail, a dentist's chair, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia, but not if he doesn't love you back.”
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“Infatuation is when you think that he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen and as athletic as Jimmy Connors. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford — but you'll take him anyway.”
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“Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying, 'I love you.'”
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“... many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love.”
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“... we love as soon as we learn to distinguish a separate 'you' and 'me.' Love is our attempt to assuage the terror and isolation of that separateness.”
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“Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.”
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“The love that passeth all understanding is in the movies.”
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“[The most memorable moments in her life:] Leaping into bed with the man I loved.”
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“Love never stands still; it must inevitably be either growing or decaying — especially the love of marriage.”
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“... love with him was a plant of very slow growth ...”
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“Love that giveth in full store, / Aye receives as much, and more.”
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“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
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“... love was a great disturbance.”
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“[On her marriage:] I know, as certainly as I live, that I have been, for twelve years, as passionate a lover as ever woman was, and hope to be so one twelve years more.”
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“I feel to love you more and more every day, and you will laugh, but I feel towards you much more like a lover than a female friend! What would I give to see you for an hour!”
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“The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.”
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“... at sixty-eight, it was very like love. I leave this remark on the page as a gift to women — that the incandescence can appear again in winter like a hibernated moth.”
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“But I had been in love pretty often and I didn't think it stood the wear and tear.”
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“Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around. We are fools to think it's any different.”
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“When passion is mutual, there is always the danger of the fire burning to ashes.”
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“There was bondage in love; no one had told her that love took away freedom.”
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“When a pair of magpies fly together / They do not envy the pair of phoenixes.”
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“... love comes to man through his senses — to woman through her imagination.”
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“Expiring for love is beautiful but stupid.”
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“Great passions, my dear, don't exist: they're liars' fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while.”
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“Conceiving love only as a warm fuzzy, you can readily forget just how much work it entails. But it's authentic work, strenuous and productive: doing a do, not avoiding a don't. It puts you in a right relation with God and others, reciprocal rather than hierarchical. At one time or another, legal penalties have been imposed for violations of all the ten commandments ... But the great commandment is extralegal. Love cannot be forced. It must be chosen. You love not out of dread but out of your own fullness. It's what you were made for. When you fail at it, you aren't sent to prison, or to the electric chair, or to hell. You are commanded again: Love.”
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“So they wrote, out of their youth earnestly, poetically, putting forth tentative thought-fingers with which to touch each other's souls.”
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“For the little while when we was lovers I breathed the air from the high places where love comes from, and I can't no more come down.”
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“If I had never met him I would have dreamed him into being.”
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“The geography of love is pornographic; its climate is much improved by money; when love comes it comes without effort, like perfect weather.”
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“I believe in love, but I'm not sitting around waiting for it. I buy houses. I travel. I take jobs on mountaintops in Transylvania. ... I know that happiness comes in many ways and if you spend your life hoping to be found by or to find a significant other, you're going to miss out on all that stuff. And that's what makes you special and makes your life rich.”
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“He would have fallen in love with me, I think, if I had been built like Brünhilde and had a mustache and the mind of an Easter chick.”
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“We discovered in each other and ourselves worlds, galaxies, a universe.”
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“Perhaps the chief business of life is simply to learn how to love.”
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“I was most confusedly in love. ... Even though I resolved not to think of him, his face would keep appearing between me and a book I tried to read, or his voice would suddenly sound instead of the words I tried to write on a page. ... I found love annoying and uncomfortable, like fetters, until I got used to it.”
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“Love is cruel as the grave.”
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“A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.”
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“The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.”
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“When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.”
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“If I had had a pistol I would have shot him — either that or fallen at his feet. There is no middle way when one loves.”
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“Love turns all the wheels of human industry, is the motive power under the world's machinery, makes worthwhile every enterprise on the earth, is coequal with life, outlasts death, and reaches onward into heaven.”
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“Love is like fire, a dangerous thing to play with, although the best of friends and the most loyal of servants when rightly handled.”
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“The tightrope of love swings back and forth, forever tied between the tree of anxiety and the tree of fear. Like life, it holds a constant reminder that death must be overcome ...”
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“Jump out of the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it, if you feel it ... passion goes, boredom remains.”
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“Great loves too must be endured.”
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“[To Marc Antony:] Fool! Don't you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you!”
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“One of my theories is that men love with their eyes; women love with their ears.”
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“Loving, like prayer, is a power as a well as a process. It's curative. It is creative.”
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“For, you see, each day I love you more, / Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.”
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“I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with.”
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“Love is not a plant of slow growth.”
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“Do you know that the sight of your face, / Though I see you each day of the seven, / Can transfigure the commonest place / Into something that seems to be heaven?”
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“The You I loved was my creation — mine, / Without a counterpart within yourself. / I gave you thoughts and soul and heart / Taken from Love's ideal.”
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“... love is the drug which ... makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.”
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“Love, love love — all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
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“The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grassblade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”
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“Love, which is such a tragic emotion to those who are suffering from it, always seems faintly comic to everyone else.”
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“I love, and the world is mine!”
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“Be still, my beating heart, be still!”
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“Before we love with our heart, we already love with our imagination.”
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“It is better not to be loved than to be ill-loved or half-loved.”
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“A man in love ... is often betrayed into doing foolish things and making promises that he knows deep down in his heart he will never keep. After marriage, his immediate problem is to secure his release from these promises without appearing to ask for it.”
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“Life is a lie, and Love a cheat.”
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“Loving you is like living in the war years.”
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“Hate generalizes; love specifies. Or: The movements of hatred are toward generalization; love's movements are toward specification.”
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“Love cannot survive if you just give it scraps of yourself, scraps of your time, scraps of your thoughts.”
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“... I love you more than my own skin ...”
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“Love is better than chocolate, but sometimes chocolate is easier to find.”
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“Cupid's arrows rarely strike two people with the same definition of cleanliness.”
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“Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one's best self.”
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“Love is a context, not a behavior.”
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“Sometimes it's necessary to believe in love, even if it doesn't exist ...”
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“Someday, when I'm awfully low, / When the world is cold, / I will feel a glow just thinking of you / And the way you look tonight.”
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“I'm in the mood for love / Simply because you're near me. / Funny, but when you're near me, / I'm in the mood for love.”
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“Now I know why my mother taught me to be true / she knew I'd meet someone exactly like you.”
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“Gee, I'd like to give you something swell, baby, diamond bracelets Woolsworth's doesn't sell, baby. Till that lucky day, you know darn well, baby, that I can't give you anything but love.”
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“Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.”
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“Love is a worn-out word. People love their cat, they love their house. I've never been in love with anyone but myself.”
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“The more you love someone the more he wants from you and the less you have to give since you've already given him your love.”
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“We love because it's the only true adventure.”
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“most of us love from our need to love not / because we find someone deserving.”
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“Love is never any better than the lover.”
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“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
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“The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep.”
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“... the final word is love.”
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“... it was she who held that part of him the gods had fashioned but casually misplaced at the moment of his birth and then absently given to her when she was born.”
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“Love is a game — yes? / I think it is a drowning.”
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“Two souls with but a single thought, / Two hearts that beat as one.”
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“Real love, no matter how unworthy the object, is a glorious adventure. It bursts the shackles of selfishness. One's world is bigger, broader; one's sympathies are amazingly more tender. No matter what the result, if you haven't really loved, you haven't really lived.”
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“Passion, I've found, is not so attractive to the observer as to the participants ...”
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“I'm glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love.”
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“I dream that love without tyranny is possible.”
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“Everyone wants Love to follow them / down their road; / where is it that Love wants to go?”
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“Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.”
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“For when by night the May wind blows / The lilac-blooms apart, / The memory of his first love / Is shaken on his heart.”
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“My heart always belongs to the one who doesn't want it.”
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“You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.”
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“I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.”
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“Love is full of imagination.”
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“Oh how absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself! Everybody should try it.”
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“Dawn love is silver, / Wait for the west: / Old love is gold love — / Old love is best.”
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“The human heart has a staggering capacity for love.”
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“In love there is no because.”
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“In a great romance, each person basically plays a part that the other really likes.”
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“Being wanted is the tender heel of everything human.”
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“... this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him.”
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“Love, first begotten of all created things ...”
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“Love and hate, Miss Kendra, are not two opposite things. They're like the front of your hand and the back of it, Two sides of the same thing. They both mean, this person matters to me.”
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“Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.”
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“Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building, and you're waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it's not that way at all. It's like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they're not colors anymore and all that's left is a white hum.”
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“The greatest love is that we know, / When life is just an afterglow.”
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“I want to die while you love me, / While yet you hold me fair, / ... / I want to die while you love me. / Oh! who would care to live / Till love has nothing more to ask, / And nothing more to give.”
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“There is no mortal art / Can overcome Time's deep, corroding rust. / Let Love's beginning expiate Love's end.”
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“I believe in the curative powers of love as the English believe in tea or Catholics believe in the Miracle of Lourdes.”
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“All things die not: while the soul lives, love lives: the song may be now gay, now plaintive, but it is deathless.”
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“Ah! life grows lovely where you are; / Only to think of you gives light / To my dark heart; within whose night / Your image, though you hide afar, / Glows like a lake-reflected star.”
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“I love you more than the gilder his gilding / and more than the dove his dove / and more than all the people in the Woolworth Building / love all the people they love.”
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“To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others.”
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“Because it corresponds to a vital need, love is overvalued in our culture. It becomes a phantom — like success — carrying with it the illusion that it is a solution for all problems.”
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“That many-faceted thing called love succeeds in building bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity, and frequently they cannot tolerate too heavy a burden without collapsing.”
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“Was the period of happiness worth the unhappiness that followed a breakup? Most people seemed to think so, because they got on the love train time and time again.”
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“All our loves are first loves.”
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“... he had fallen desperately and permanently in love with a woman in a yellow hat whose car had been held up by traffic, and whom he never saw again ...”
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“Soft are the hands of Love, / soft, soft are his feet ...”
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“Stars will blossom in the darkness, / Violets bloom beneath the snow.”
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“There is too little courtship in the world. ... For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes, and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; a sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; an undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.”
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“Love was a kind of grief.”
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“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
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“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”
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“Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.”
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“Many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from the real, true, and perfect thing.”
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“Ah your face / but it's whether / you can keep me warm.”
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“Love, genuine love, makes people good.”
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“Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.”
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“Platonic love is love from the neck up.”
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“We had a lot in common, I loved him and he loved him.”
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“The mark of a true crush (whether the object is man, woman or city) is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.”
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“Love is the light that you see by.”
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“... unremembered and afar, / I watched you, as I watch a star, / Through darkness struggling into view, / And I loved you better than you knew.”
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“... love is that burning fire which devours everything and shall never, never cease in all the endless ages to come.”
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“Take care, you who wish / to deal with names / for love. Behind their sweetness / and wrath, nothing endures. / Nothing but wounds and kisses.”
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“Love has seven names. / Do you know what they are? / Rope, Light, Fire, Coal / ... / Dew, Hell, the Living Water.”
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“Love has seven names, / Which, as you know, are appropriate to her; / Chain, light, live coal, and fire — / ... dew, living spring, and hell.”
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“Love! The poor word. How it has suffered up and down the streets of the world.”
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“... love all the people you can. The sufferings from love are not to be compared to the sorrows of loneliness.”
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“... the realization of great mutual love can at times be so overwhelming a thing, that even the bravest of hearts may grow fearful.”
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“... her loves were so varied that no rule could be discovered by which to judge them. She loved wildly, without either chart or compass ... a thing of torn sails and stricken masts, that never came within sight of a harbor.”
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“Hate is funny. Love isn't. Love can kill you. Hate can keep you alive.”
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“... it was first love. There's no love like that. I don't wish it on a soul. I don't hate anyone enough.”
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“To try to say entirely why one loves what one does seems not only a fruitless task, but a little wrongheaded, on the order of dissection and with those consequences.”
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“Art is the accomplice of love.”
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“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.”
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“Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile.”
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“What could equal the bliss? / The thrill of the first kiss / It'll blow right to you / It's never as good as the first time.”
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“'Love' is finding the familiar dear. / 'In love' is to be taken by surprise.”
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“I bless / all knowledge of love, all ways of publishing it.”
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“Never doubt love ... Never question it when it comes onstage, but be happy for its entrance. And do not weep when it makes its exit, for it leaves behind it the sweet aroma of caring, a fragrance to linger the rest of your life.”
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“If I'm not loved when I love, the lack can't be repaired by any action of mine or repented by the person who doesn't love me.”
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“Perhaps loving something is the only starting place there is for making your life your own.”
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“Men and women fall in love because of the way they feel about themselves when they are together.”
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“There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.”
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“Love is nothing, nothing, nothing like they say.”
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“To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many many endings, and many many beginnings — all in the same relationship.”
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“My love for you is more / Athletic than a verb ...”
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“Love didn't always solve the problem; sometimes it became the problem.”
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“Oh baby, I want to be your direct object. You know, that is to say I want to be on the other side of all the verbs I know you know how to use.”
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“There will be a time you bury me / Or I bury you in the garden.”
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“The love of my life came not / As love unto others is cast; / For mine was a secret wound — / But the wound grew a pearl, at last.”
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“For the love of a tree, / she went out on a limb. / For the love of the sea, / she rocked the boat. / For the love of the earth, / she dug deeper. / For the love of community, / she mended fences. / For the love of stars, / she let her light shine. / For the love of spirit, / she nurtured her soul. / For the love of a good time, / she sowed seeds of happiness. / For the love of the Goddess, she drew down the moon. / For the love of nature, / she made compost. / For the love of a good meal, / she gave thanks. / For the love of family, / she reconciled differences. / For the love of creativity, / she entertained new possibilities. / For the love of her enemies, / she suspended judgment. / For the love of herself, / she acknowledged her worth. / And the world was richer for her.”
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“We never leave each other. / When does your mouth / say goodbye to your heart?”
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“It is sacrilege to attempt analysis of birth or love or death. Death and birth, the mysteries! Love, the revelation!”
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“... in the capacities of loving, as in all other capacities, there be diversities of gifts ...”
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“... they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.”
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“I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine ...”
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“... love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.”
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“Real love, I've learned, is a very, very strong form of forgiveness. I don't think people yearn for love because they hate staying home alone on Saturday night or because they dread going into restuarants alone. People want love because they want their taped-together glasses or ten extra pounds to be forgiven. They want someone to look past the surface stuff like bad-hair days, a too-loud laugh or potato chips crunching in their living-room couch when anyone sits down.”
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“It is not so much a question of what love is as of what love does.”
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“The simple but observable fact is that the more you love, the more you are able to love.”
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“Sex and love are like tea and milk. They can be mixed or they can be taken straight. Each has certain distinctive characteristics, but when they are combined they form a unique substance.”
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“Philosophers and poets may argue that true love is ephemeral ... but lovers know better: It is physical. Love can be made to ring under our feet with all the certainty of stone.”
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“Let me call you Sweetheart / I'm in love with you. / Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.”
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“No riches from his scanty store / My lover could impart; / He gave a boon I valued more — / He gave me all his heart!”
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“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
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“The world loves us when we choose to love the world.”
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“... love — that arbitrary and inexorable tyrant.”
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“Those that we love never alter, unless we cease to love them ...”
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“It is easier to win love than to keep it.”
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“In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.”
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“Romantic love has always seemed to me unaccountable, unassailable, unforgettable, and nearly always unattainable. ... I have found it only twice, in all its perfection, yet I feel that I have always been engaged in it — as if it were something that must always reappear, like leaves on trees. I suppose I am among those people who have always been, and rarely are, in love.”
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“All love shifts and changes. I don't know if you can be wholeheartedly in love all the time.”
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“Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death.”
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“[Operator to a would-be caller during a telephone strike in France:] Love is not an emergency.”
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“The next greatest pleasure to love is to talk of love.”
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“Love is friendship that has caught fire. ... Love is content with the present, it hopes for the future, and it doesn't brood over the past. It's the day-in and day-out chronicle of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and working toward common goals. If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.”
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“Love — bittersweet, irrepressible — / loosens my limbs and I tremble.”
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“Art thou the topmost apple / The gatherers could not reach, / Reddening on the bough? / Shall I not take thee?”
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“I love you like forty / fond sisters.”
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“... my love for you's so strong / That no one could kill it — not even you.”
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“[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.”
-
“Sometime day breaks in my life / Sometime the sun shines in my life / Sometime things work right in my life / You are my sometime.”
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“Mortal love is but the licking of honey from thorns.”
-
“... the human need for love and sex is made to bear the burden of all our bodily starvation for contact and sensation, all our creative starvation, all our need for social contact, and even our need to find meaning in our lives.”
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“Whether or not we find what we are seeking / Is idle, biologically speaking.”
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“Love ... is a sacred fire that must not be burnt to idols.”
-
“True love is usually the most inconvenient kind.”
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“[Horseback riding with Henry Cadogan, whom she loved:] Life seized us and inspired us with a mad sense of revelry. The humming wind and the teeming earth shouted 'Life! Life!' as we rode. Life! life! the bountiful, the magnificent! Age was far from us ... For us the wide plain and the limitless world, for us the beauty and the freshness of the morning!”
-
“Love. It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between.”
-
“To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.”
-
“I have loved many, the more and the few — / I have loved many that I might love you.”
-
“To make someone love you, see them as the person they want to be.”
-
“Love doesn't just drop on you unexpectedly; you have to give off signals, sort of like an amateur radio operator.”
-
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.”
-
“Love: It will kill you and save you, both.”
-
“I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.”
-
“Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice.”
-
“It is time that determines the intensity of love.”
-
“Love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”
-
“What is love? You learn only as you go along.”
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“Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived.”