quotations about love
People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You've heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What's so sweet about that?
STEPHEN KING
Joyland
When it comes to attracting men, logic escapes even the savviest of women. Probably because there is no logic involved.... You can read all the self-help books you want, you can run on a treadmill till you've reduced your tuchas to bubkes, you can stuff your face with oysters, and it won't make a bit of difference. For love, attraction, compatibility, and companionship are not a science of objectivity; they are, rather, far and away the single most subjective matter in the history of the universe. Did Cavewoman X have a romp in the cave with Caveman Y because of his universally sought-after ability to single-handedly kill a wildebeest with his bare hands and bring it to the feet of his intended? No, she probably just liked the way his mouth turned up at the corners in concentration while he chiseled out a piece of flint.
GWEN MACSAI
Lipshtick
Love is a word from the old poems you read. In real life there is no love. Men come together like apes and birds. It is sweet sometimes to play with a woman, but the wind blows and there is an end of it.
VICKI BAUM
Love and Death in Bali
The capacity to love is the fruit of age, not the monopoly of youth.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love fattens on smooth words.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
Me: Stories of My Life
A man in love is incomplete until he has married--then he's finished.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
Newsweek, Mar. 28, 1960
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
When you love someone
you have to let them go.
It's the only way to keep them.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
Seasons of Your Heart
I think love is serious. It's like an invention: sometimes it lies deep down inside you, great and quiet--and at other times it racks you and keeps you from sleeping.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Septimus
We had known each other for many years; starved together, worked together, loved each other, suffered each other, made love; and yet the most tremendous consummation of our love was occurring now, as she patiently, in love and terror, held my hand.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn't spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Bingo Palace
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction. Her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, yielding more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books.
The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Romantic Love
To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour -- the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
I don't love you any less, but I can't love you anymore.
LYLE LOVETT
"I Can't Love You Anymore", The Road to Ensenada
Love is a negative form of hatred.
ROGER ZELAZNY
This Immortal
Love's dream, too, knows decay;
Awhile the soul-harp's wildly thrilling strain
Pours out those notes we ne'er forget again,
And the deep fountains of the heart burst forth
As if to gladden every spot of earth;
But O! it will not stay.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"Song of the Earth-Weary"
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
ANAIS NIN
diary, May 30, 1934
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
MAYA ANGELOU
A Brave and Startling Truth
Love he comes and Love he tarries
Just as fate or fancy carries;
Longest stays, when sorest chidden;
Laughs and flies, when press'd and bidden.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love