LOVE QUOTES XL

quotations about love

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


Love is a concept none of us really understand but yet we try to define it in the small square of accepted norms. When two people love each other and want to be together in more than one way, gender, society, age, caste, creed stops mattering.

SHRIYA JOSHI

"This Short Film About Freedom To Love Is Our Gift To You On Independence Day", Storypick, August 12, 2016


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

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE

"The Valley", Poetical Meditations

Tags: Alphonse de Lamartine


In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.

KOBO ABE

The Box Man

Tags: Kobo Abe


I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.

NORMAN MAILER

Harlot's Ghost


How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


Great Love has many attributes, and shrines
For varied worshippers, but his force divine
Shows most its many-named fulness in the man
Whose nature multitudinously mixed--
Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought--
Resists all easy gladness, all content
Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul
Flooded with consciousness of good that is
Finds life one bounteous answer.

GEORGE ELIOT

The Spanish Gypsy


Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"Down by the Salley Gardens", Crossways

Tags: William Butler Yeats


Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow.

ST. AUGUSTINE

On the Mystical Body of Christ

Tags: St. Augustine


A lover is like a firefly,
lighting your life for a moment,
then leaving you to deal with the darkness
Until it flashes again.

RICH REITH

"Soulmate"


Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

GEORGE ELIOT

Middlemarch


You see, love is strong. Stronger than hate even. Love is the only thing that can kill hate, nothing else. You see, hate destroys and that's why love is stronger. It builds.

PETER ABRAHAMS

The Path of Thunder

Tags: Peter Abrahams


Without love, we are nothing but organic molecules circling around the sun.

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.


Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?

LEONID ANDREYEV

He Who Gets Slapped

Tags: Leonid Andreyev


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

Tags: Marcel Proust


When there is love in the heart, there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous hues.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare


We had known each other for many years; starved together, worked together, loved each other, suffered each other, made love; and yet the most tremendous consummation of our love was occurring now, as she patiently, in love and terror, held my hand.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: James Baldwin


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