quotations about love
The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
A man in love is incomplete until he has married--then he's finished.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
Newsweek, Mar. 28, 1960
Love released from bond, and unburdened of its fetters, is love no longer.
THOMAS BURKE
A Love Lesson
There are moments of passion and joy, but most of this love is enduring the long stretches of dealing with not-so-thrilling stuff because one has to do so and no one else will. Moreover, one cannot imagine doing otherwise. If that sounds like your marriage, congratulations.
ANDY SENIOR
"Love and the Single Factotum", Syncopated Times, September 26, 2018
For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
She has not fallen in love. Love has been a flight, not a fall. She has risen into a new life; in her is born a new experience. Perhaps it has come suddenly, with a rush which has overwhelmed her with its tumultuous surprise. Perhaps it has grown gradually, so gradually that she has been quite unconscious of its advent until it has taken complete possession of her. As the water lily bursts open the moment the sun strikes upon it, and the rose turns from bud to blossom so gradually that the closest observation discerns no movement in the petals, so some souls bloom instantly when love touches them with its sunbeam, and others, unconscious and unobserved, pass from girlhood to womanhood. In either case it is love that works the miracle. She has not known the secret of her own heart. Or if she has known it, she cannot tell it to any one else --no, not even to herself! She only knows that within her is a secret room, wherein is a sacred shrine. But she has not the key; and what is enshrined there she will not permit even herself to know. She is a strange contradiction to herself. She is restless away from him and strangely silent in his presence, or breaks the silence only to be still more strangely voluble. She chides herself for not being herself, and has in truth become or is becoming another self. So one could imagine a green shoot beckoned imperiously by the sunlight, and neither daring to emerge from its familiar life beneath the ground nor able to resist the impulse; or a bird irresistibly called by life, and neither daring to break the egg nor able to remain longer in the prison-house of its infancy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Danger and anger are everywhere. Love is the rarity, the gem buried in the core of the mine, the outpost of God.
TANITH LEE
Metallic Love
Love brooks no delay.
ROMAN PROVERB
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Heart of the Matter
Love is an immortal wound that cannot be closed up. A person loses something, a part of her soul, when she loves someone. And she goes about looking for that lost part of her soul, for she knows that otherwise she is incomplete and cannot be at rest. It is only when she is with the person she loves that she becomes complete again in herself; but the moment he leaves, she loses that part which he has taken with him and knows no rest till she has found him once more.
LIN YUTANG
Moment in Peking
Love is always right.
RICHARD LAYMON
The Stake
Happy is love or friendship when returned--
The lovers whose pure flames have equal burned.
BION OF SMYRNA
"Friendship"
Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Love is to be the lodestar of our lives and, if blessed with the capacity to exercise it, we can aspire to imitate God.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy. Indeed, as the Four Wise Ones once said, it may be all you need.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The World in Six Songs
Love thy neighbor, but pull not down thy hedge.
GERMAN PROVERB
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Mon Coeur Mis a Nu
Nothing is so strange when one is in love ... as the complete indifference of other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
ANNE CARSON
Eros the Bittersweet
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
NORMAN MAILER
Harlot's Ghost