LOVE QUOTES XLVII

quotations about love

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

Tags: Julian Barnes


Is it the beloved who evokes love, or the lover who has love to give?

DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS

The Lost Diary of Don Juan

Tags: Douglas Carlton Abrams


The end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Powerbook


It is love that I am seeking for,
But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
That is not in the world.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The Shadowy Waters

Tags: William Butler Yeats


Love must be the same in all worlds.

HORACE MANN

Thoughts

Tags: Horace Mann


When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.

JOHN BERGER

Ways of Seeing

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Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Written on the Body


Love it is the precious loom,
Whose shuttle weaves each tangled thread,
And works flowers of exquisite bloom,
Shedding their perfume where we tread.

JAMES MCINTYRE

"Power of Love"


Love is my religion--I could die for that.

JOHN KEATS

letter to Fanny Brawne, Oct. 13, 1819

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Love rays us round as glory swathes a star,
And, from the mystic touch of lips and palms,
Streams rosy warmth!

GERALD MASSEY

"To My Wife"

Tags: Gerald Massey


Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth;
Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.

RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH

"Love"


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"

Tags: Emma Goldman


One love drives out another.

SPANISH PROVERB


True love, selfless love, does not wither as beauty fades or life becomes difficult. If anything, its roots grow deeper and its branches spread farther with each shared experience.

EDITOR

"Music and the Spoken Word: What love is", Deseret News, April 2, 2016


Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

Eugene Aram: A Tale

Tags: Edward Bulwer-Lytton


It is the plain women who know about love; the beautiful women are too busy being fascinating.

KATHARINE HEPBURN

attributed, Evan Esar's 20,000 Quips & Quotes


Love is a confidence trick, that's all. It's Nature's way of suckering a mammal with a brain and a long, vulnerable gestation period into reproducing. Humans can think, so ordinary animal-grade maternal instinct wouldn't be enough to make human women go through all that, not if they stopped and thought about what's involved. So you have love. It's a substitute for rational thought.

K. J. PARKER

Evil for Evil


When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

Four Quarters, 1970

Tags: Robert Penn Warren


The only way to experience love is to buy it and have it installed in your head. But, like most technology, its shelf-life is limited.

GERMAIN LUSSIER

"Love Is a Gadget in This Upcoming Scott Eastwood Film", Gizmodo, August 15, 2016


You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.

ANITA BROOKNER

Hotel du Lac