LOVE QUOTES IX
quotations about love
Unconditional love. That's what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn't he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Reunion
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
BIBLE
Leviticus 19:18
The world has little to bestow
Where two fond hearts in equal love are joined.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Delia
Sexual ecstasy usually arises among dyads, or groups of two, but the ritual ecstasy of "primitives" emerged within groups generally composed of thirty or more participants. Thanks to psychology and the psychological concerns of Western culture generally, we have a rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to another--from the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the "love" that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
Dancing in the Streets
Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep--her face
turned to the wall!
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
Life is like a pipe, and love is the fuse.
THEOPHILUS MARZIALS
"Chelsea"
PIGLET: How do you spell 'love'?
POOH: You don't spell it, you feel it.
A. A. MILNE
Winnie the Pooh
I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Jan. 19, 1938
In this day and age, love is temporary and marriage is unnatural--the product of Madison Avenue advertising executives and television producers.
MICHAEL PALMER
The Fifth Vial
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
ANNE CARSON
The Beauty of the Husband
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
JOHN DONNE
The Anagram
We all crave love. Its universal language unites us as humans. Yet, it also slays us. If you gave people a choice between heartbreak and the Zika virus, we'd all be feverish in bed. Love's pain spreads across our flesh faster than any plague. As soon as you think you're cured, you relapse.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
Sometimes it seems ... as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
Love, amid the other graces of this world, is like a cathedral tower, which begins at the earth and at the first is surrounded by the other parts of the structure. But at length, rising above buttresses, wall and arch, and parapet and pinnacle, it shoots, spire-like, many a foot right into the air, so high that the huge cross on its summit glows like a spark in the morning light, and shines like a star in the evening sky, when the rest of the pile is enveloped in darkness. So love here is surrounded by the other graces, and divides the honors with them; but they will have felt the wrap of night and of darkness, when it will shine, luminous, against the sky of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Love is the garden of the young.
HERBERT KRETZMER
"A Heart Full of Love (Reprise)", Les Miserables
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
BIBLE
John 15:13
Only love heals. Anger, guilt, and fear can only destroy.
ALYSON NOEL
Evermore