quotations about love
You're not sick, you're just in love.
IRVING BERLIN
"You're Just in Love"
Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is blindness
U2
"Love Is Blindness", Achtung Baby
All love's details burned bright. Surely they meant something? Surely they were enough? But they came and went and there we still were, with new unfillable space between us.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question "Why can't our lives be like that?" It's a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.
DAVID SEDARIS
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
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
Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
Biologically speaking, love is the backbone of the social bonds that are critical for our survival and adaptation. These intimate bonds alter the brain's circuitry and tip the hormonal balance to shape our memories, emotions and ultimately our 'self.' In essence, every important relationship we have shapes our brain, which in turn shapes our very relationships. Lucky for us, there are many different types of love: maternal love, familial love, the kind we feel when we cuddle a pet, hug a tree, or even a special blanket. While love itself is characterized as an emotion like anger and sadness, there is also a strong biological desire -- sexual desire -- which drives all living species to populate our world.
CLAUDIA AGUIRRE
"Your Brain on Love", Huffington Post, February 15, 2016
Love, however doomed, had the capacity to attach buoys to the soul.
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Love prepares us for martyrdom.
PHILIP KOSLOSKI
"Love is What Prepares Us For Every Form of Martyrdom", National Catholic Register, March 22, 2016
We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. You may never know if you have made the right choice. But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless.
ROXANNE GAY
"Where the Hell Is the Love of My Life?", New York Times, October 18, 2018
It is as absurd to deny that it is possible for a man always to love the same woman, as it would be to affirm that some famous musician needed several violins in order to execute a piece of music or compose a charming melody.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization
Love is blind.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Any love is enveloping and potentially dangerous; after all, you are putting your heart into someone else's hands and with that an incredible power to cause pain of various kinds (and vice versa). That's a given. But there is an additional absolutism about first love, when you have nothing to compare it with. You don't know anything, yet you feel you know everything -- this can be calamitous.
JULIAN BARNES
interview, The Guardian, January 29, 2018
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
For me, however, if I understand the concept, to love properly and in earnest one would have to do it anonymously, or at least in an undeclared fashion, so as not to seem to ask anything in return, since asking and getting are the antithesis of love--if, as I say, I have the concept aright, which from all I have said and all that has been said to me so far it appears I do not. It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods--well.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities