quotations about love
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
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.
TOM ROBBINS
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Tom Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was made into a movie in 1993 starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
ANAIS NIN
attributed, French Writers of the Past
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.
I've never had my heart broken ... It's a very sad state of affairs. I think everybody should have their heart broken. I don't think it says anything good about me at all ... My lover and my best friend and my partner has been my work. But I certainly would in life have wanted to know--would like to know--what it was like to have a real partner.
SALLY FIELD
Good Housekeeping, Mar. 2009
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
Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
Love is an inevitable part of the human experience, and ironically, the least understood.
PRACHI GANGWANI
"I Hypothalamus You: Love Is In the Brain Not Heart", iDiva, August 4, 2016
Love makes a few weeks so rich that all the rest of our lives seems poor in comparison.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Love is a great beautifier.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life.
SMILEY BLANTON
Love or Perish
Smiley Blanton (1882-1966) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. A patient of Sigmund Freud, his Diary of My Analysis with Freud appeared in 1971. Later in his career, Blanton collaborated with Norman Vincent Peale in establishing the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry. Together, they opened the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic at the Marble Collegiate Church on lower Fifth Avenue, where free assistance was offered to people suffering from emotional disturbances such as anxiety and depression.
Few people love with the violence they hate.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
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
If love lives through all life; and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom--whence it passes with the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Newcomes
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Poems from Blake's Notebook
Love is always right.
RICHARD LAYMON
The Stake
Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail.
TOM ROBBINS
Villa Incognito
Tom Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was made into a movie in 1993 starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
JOHN KEATS
"Lamia"
Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth;
Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"