LOVE QUOTES XLII

quotations about love

Few people love with the violence they hate.

NORMAN MACDONALD

Maxims and Moral Reflections


The plough of Time breaks up our Eden-land,
And tramples down its fruitful flowery prime.
Yet thro' the dust of ages living shoots
O' the old immortal seed start in the furrows;
And, where Love looked on with glorious eye,
These quicken'd germs of everlastingness
Flower lusty, as of old in Paradise!

GERALD MASSEY

"Wooed and Won"


All the world loves a lover, but how it does laugh at his love letters.

EDGAR GUEST

Home Rhymes

Tags: Edgar Guest


Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

ANAIS NIN

attributed, French Writers of the Past

Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.

Tags: Anais Nin


I loved a being, an idea of my own mind, which had no real existence. I concreted this abstract of perfection, I annexed this fictitious quality to the idea presented by a name; the being, whom that name signified, was by no means worthy of this. This is the truth: Unless I am determinedly blind -- unless I am resolved causelessly and selfishly to seek destruction, I must see it. Plain! is it not plain? I loved a being; the being, whom I loved, is not what she was; consequently, as love appertains to mind, and not body, she exists no longer. I regret when I find that she never existed, but in my mind; yet does it not border on willful deception, deliberate, intentional self-deceit, to continue to love the body, when the soul is no more?

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Jun. 2, 1811


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

LEONID ANDREYEV

He Who Gets Slapped

Tags: Leonid Andreyev


Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents.

BERTOLT BRECHT

"Love of Whom?"

Tags: Bertolt Brecht


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


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


The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

Conversations with Samuel R. Delany

Tags: Samuel R. Delany


Are you a man? Then don't disgrace your manhood and go "moping" about because a worthless girl has "jilted" you, and sacrificed truth and honour to her inclination for the time being. You have heard that there are supposed to be as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. I believe there are better; try and catch them, and be thankful for the escape you have had. If you are a man, don't try to drown your grief with the brandy bottle, you might as well drown it in the river; but act like one, and your mind will soon be at ease. Young women, if any of you have been cast off by a thing in man's garb, fret not, you can easily get a better, and remember you have the deep sympathy of every man worthy the name who knows how you have been treated. Parents, it is your duty to watch over your children, and much of the above sort of pain that is in the world endured, might be avoided.

T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH

"On Requited Love", Short Essays


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

Tags: Graham Greene


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


We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


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


In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook


Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied.

K. J. PARKER

Devices and Desires


Love wasn't the soft, silky words the poets spoke of. Love, with it's twin edges, was the one factor that weakened so many women, that pushed them to compromise their own wants, their own needs for the needs and wants of another.

NORA ROBERTS

Sweet Revenge


There are many kinds of love, as many kinds of light,
And every kind of love makes a glory in the night.
There is love that stirs the heart, and love that gives it rest,
But the love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best.

HENRY VAN DYKE

"Love and Light"


Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?

JANE AUSTEN

Pride and Prejudice

Tags: Jane Austen