quotations about love
Marriage--what an abomination! Love--yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood--transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife--you know all about her--who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au dela? There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impossible ... the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there--only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal ... Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au dela.
GEORGE MOORE
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/l/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37
Confessions of a Young Man
Love released from bond, and unburdened of its fetters, is love no longer.
THOMAS BURKE
A Love Lesson
Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder;
Love is a poignant and accustomed pain.
It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;
It is a linnet's fluting after rain.
JOYCE KILMER
"In Memory"
Happy is love or friendship when returned--
The lovers whose pure flames have equal burned.
BION OF SMYRNA
"Friendship"
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
ROBERT BROWNING
"Fra Lippo Lippi"
For me, however, if I understand the concept, to love properly and in earnest one would have to do it anonymously, or at least in an undeclared fashion, so as not to seem to ask anything in return, since asking and getting are the antithesis of love--if, as I say, I have the concept aright, which from all I have said and all that has been said to me so far it appears I do not. It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods--well.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
She has not fallen in love. Love has been a flight, not a fall. She has risen into a new life; in her is born a new experience. Perhaps it has come suddenly, with a rush which has overwhelmed her with its tumultuous surprise. Perhaps it has grown gradually, so gradually that she has been quite unconscious of its advent until it has taken complete possession of her. As the water lily bursts open the moment the sun strikes upon it, and the rose turns from bud to blossom so gradually that the closest observation discerns no movement in the petals, so some souls bloom instantly when love touches them with its sunbeam, and others, unconscious and unobserved, pass from girlhood to womanhood. In either case it is love that works the miracle. She has not known the secret of her own heart. Or if she has known it, she cannot tell it to any one else --no, not even to herself! She only knows that within her is a secret room, wherein is a sacred shrine. But she has not the key; and what is enshrined there she will not permit even herself to know. She is a strange contradiction to herself. She is restless away from him and strangely silent in his presence, or breaks the silence only to be still more strangely voluble. She chides herself for not being herself, and has in truth become or is becoming another self. So one could imagine a green shoot beckoned imperiously by the sunlight, and neither daring to emerge from its familiar life beneath the ground nor able to resist the impulse; or a bird irresistibly called by life, and neither daring to break the egg nor able to remain longer in the prison-house of its infancy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization
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
Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow.
ST. AUGUSTINE
On the Mystical Body of Christ
Love, however doomed, had the capacity to attach buoys to the soul.
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Méditations Poétiques
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
Let no man believe he truly loves,
Who lives, or moves, or thinks, or hath his being
In any other atmosphere than Love's,
Who is our absolute master.
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
Keep Your Own Secret
You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
How to Write
Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
ANNE CARSON
Eros the Bittersweet
Love's the big hint life can't stop dropping, the biggest beguilement of all.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from it's surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.
DANIEL HANDLER
Adverbs
Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is blindness
U2
"Love Is Blindness", Achtung Baby