LOVE QUOTES LI

quotations about love

Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: Honoré de Balzac


Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: Honoré de Balzac


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

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One of the cruelest things about a wrong love is that it delights in tangles and hidden ways; that it teaches and practices deceit from its first inception; that its earliest efforts are toward destroying all older and more sacred attachments.

AMELIA E. BARR

A Singer from the Sea

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There are moments of passion and joy, but most of this love is enduring the long stretches of dealing with not-so-thrilling stuff because one has to do so and no one else will. Moreover, one cannot imagine doing otherwise. If that sounds like your marriage, congratulations.

ANDY SENIOR

"Love and the Single Factotum", Syncopated Times, September 26, 2018


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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Let me prevail as of old, as lover, as lord, as king, or have done with Love's tyrant rule.

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

To Nimue

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Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Lighthousekeeping


A man is only as good as what he loves.

SAUL BELLOW

Seize the Day

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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

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The gospel of love spread among a sex for the needs of militarism and the labor market has filled woman with the spiritual hysteria of apostleship.

MARIAN COX

"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays


Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.

M. C. BEATON

Love, Lies and Liquor

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For misdirected love, the attainment of its object is, indeed, the best cure; but it cures as the guillotine cures headache.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts

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Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Esmond


Love is the crown that glorifies; the curse
That brands and burdens; it is life and death.
It is the great law of the universe;
And nothing can exist without its breath.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"What Love Is"


What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the Lighthouse

Tags: Virginia Woolf


What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Powerbook


This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.

MARCEL PROUST

Within a Budding Grove


Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Plague of Doves

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It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair