quotations about love
When you love someone, you don't have a choice.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Ashes
When we consider the lofty character of love, and remember his wonderful helpfulness to man, it would seem that he could have no opposition in his work, nor enemies under the sun; yet there is a whole bunch of fellows who are constantly antagonizing love. Among them are anger, hatred, revenge, envy, and jealousy. Love will have no fellowship with these, and if any one of them is admitted into the heart love goes out.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
All the world loves a lover, but how it does laugh at his love letters.
EDGAR GUEST
Home Rhymes
Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
Between the horses of love and lust we are trampled underfoot.
U2
"So Cruel", Achtung Baby
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue
I'd go crawling down the avenue
There's nothing that I wouldn't do
To make you feel my love
BOB DYLAN
"Make You Feel My Love", Time Out of Mind
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Light in August
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able together to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
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
When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
Life without Love is as a flower without fragrance.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
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
Such as are excited by the gentler influence of Love assume more of affection in their looks, sink their voice into greater softness, and manifest in their gestures greater nobleness of soul.
XENOPHON
The Banquet
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation"
Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
'Tis a secret: none knows how it comes, how it goes:
But the name of the secret is Love!
LEWIS CARROLL
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Love is the grand prize and the garbage heap. Love is a spiritual root canal and the only thing that makes life worth living. Love is a little taste of always and a big bite of nothing. And love is everything in between these extremes.
ROBERT FULGHUM
True Love