quotations about love
Love is the kiss
in the quiet nest
while the leaves are trembling,
mirrored in the water.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
The Butterfly's Evil Spell
To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
If you love someone, when it's the most real, the most important thing in your life, it's not enough to coast. You need to dig in those footers, start building on that base. You want something to last, you put your back into it.
NORA ROBERTS
Blue Smoke
The prerequisite to loving others is to love yourself. If you don't have a healthy respect for who you are, and if you don't learn to accept yourself faults and all, you will never be able to properly love other people.
JOEL OSTEEN
Become a Better You
No distance can keep anxious lovers long asunder.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, Sep. 30, 1779
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules.
TOM ROBBINS
Still Life with Woodpecker
Tom Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was made into a movie in 1993 starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics".
Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.
RITA MAE BROWN
Full Cry
At night the grackle Love will start
To shriek and shrill,
Nor will he once be still
Till he has wide awake the backward heart.
So selfish Love,
Go hush;
Feathers and claws take off
Or seek some bush.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Three Valentines"
Every little thing wants to be loved.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Secret Life of Bees
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Sandman, #65
Neil Gaiman (born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, films, and nonfiction. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels such as American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
Love holds everything together with a girdle of barbed wire encased in a sheath of pink cotton wool.
TIM LOTT
"Love is ... a torment and a joy. And it's not for softies", The Guardian, July 22, 2016
Tim Lott (born 23 January 1956) is a novelist, travel journalist, and an occasional op-ed writer for the Independent on Sunday.
I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Love is nothing but lust misspelled.
DAN SIMMONS
Olympos
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
WOODY ALLEN
Love and Death
The utopia of love is completion to the point of stillness. The ideal act of love is to contain all.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Love, which, in concert with Abstinence, established Faith, and which, along with Patience, builds up Chastity, is like the columns that sustain the four corners of a house. For it was that same Love which planted a glorious garden redolent with precious herbs and noble flowers--roses and lilies--which breathed forth a wondrous fragrance, that garden on which the true Solomon was accustomed to feast his eyes.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
letter to the Monk Guibert, 1176
Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex