quotations about love
"To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved."
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
Love is not enough. But, it is the rock on which all else stands.
NORA ROBERTS
Blood Brothers
You can't make me love you.
NEIL GAIMAN
Coraline
Neil Gaiman (born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, films, and nonfiction. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels such as American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
Love is the building blocks of creation, love is the substance from which we are made. From love, to love, by love.
MUNEERA RASHIDA
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
Woman has been trained to stake her all upon love, to dream and plan and wait and focusu life's Multitudinousness upon love's little glamour. And the inquiry is as pertinent now as ever before to ask is such a policy of life propitious to woman's happiness or evolution? Or, if one may not be allowed to take such a pagan view of woman's destiny, to ask is it essential to the happiness or evolution of man?
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in a play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain -- the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess -- whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
When we fall in love, we hope--both egotistically and altruistically--that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.
JULIAN BARNES
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization
Why is the measure of love loss?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"For What Binds Us"
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
JAMES THURBER
Life Magazine, Mar. 14, 1960
Love called, and I could not linger,
But sought the forbidden tryst,
As music follows the finger
Of the dreaming lutanist.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Telepathy"
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head