LOVE QUOTES XXXI

quotations about love

We need to cooperate to survive, to subsist, to learn, to reproduce and to raise our children. Romantic and parental love is essentially the neurochemical reward for cooperating, which is cognitively quite difficult.

ANNA MACHIN

"What is love? You asked Google -- here's the answer", The Guardian, July 11, 2018


What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Passion


When love grows diseas'd, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a ling'ring and consumptive passion.

GEORGE ETHEREGE

The Man of Mode

Tags: George Etherege


When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Infinities

Tags: John Banville


Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Passion

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

WILLIAM FAULKNER

"Beyond"

Tags: William Faulkner


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


A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.

DAVID SEDARIS

Naked

Tags: David Sedaris


A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: Honoré de Balzac


A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.

GEORGE ELIOT

Felix Holt


Ah, love, 'tis a sorrowful land!

KENNETH RAND

"The Old Lovers"

Tags: Kenneth Rand


Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?

MATTHEW ARNOLD

"The Buried Life"

Tags: Matthew Arnold


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"

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


And you tempt me into your House of Love--
I, who have come from far
Through wintry forest and homeless heath,
Friend of the wind and star?
Ah, I fear the warmth of the ingleside
And the depths of your dear caress
Will make me forget what I learned out there
In the stubble and loneliness!

KARLE WILSON BAKER

"The Moor-child", Blue Smoke

Karle Wilson Baker (1878-1960) was an American poet and author. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her last collection of poetry, Dreamers on Horseback, in 1931.

Tags: Karle Wilson Baker


As your lover describes you, so you are.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Sexing the Cherry

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover--except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give.

JOHN BERGER

G. John Berger

Tags: John Berger


Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.

GEORGE ELIOT

Janet's Repentance


Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Formation of the Scientific Mind

Tags: Gaston Bachelard


Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Marriage and Morals

Tags: Bertrand Russell


Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Looking Glass War

Tags: John le Carré