quotations about love
Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
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Marriage and Morals
What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Love is love's reward.
JOHN DRYDEN
Palamon and Arcite
Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Man in My Basement
It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.
ROALD DAHL
"The Heart of a Mouse", The Witches
Wail not too wildly for expiring Love:
The Love that dies was never quite alive.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Love is not enough. But, it is the rock on which all else stands.
NORA ROBERTS
Blood Brothers
Then is Love blest, when from the cup of the body he drinks the wine of the soul.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Love is basically for teenagers, and when it comes to real life for grown-ups, you're far better off with someone who's moderately pleased to see you when you're around, but leaves you in peace when you've got things to do.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
There is no balm of Gilead,
No salve, no soothing ointment
To stay the pain of one who's had
In love a disappointment--
Unless it be that healing lotion
Of fixing on a new devotion.
RICHARD ARMOUR
"Pastures New"
It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in a play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain -- the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess -- whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
The pain of love is how slowly it dies.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Advantages of Having One Leg", On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
ANITA BROOKNER
A Friend from England
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
If they substituted the word "Lust" for "Love" in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath