quotations about love
There is no balm of Gilead,
No salve, no soothing ointment
To stay the pain of one who's had
In love a disappointment--
Unless it be that healing lotion
Of fixing on a new devotion.
RICHARD ARMOUR
"Pastures New"
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
ANITA BROOKNER
A Friend from England
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
G. K. CHESTERTON
attributed, Life is a Verb
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
WILLIAM FAULKNER
"Beyond"
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
Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Dec. 20, 1810
Love is the centre and circumference;
The cause and aim of all things--'tis the key
To joy and sorrow, and the recompense
For all the ills that have been, or may be.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
False love is like the counterfeiter's coin,
A criminal deception.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Love's Counterfeits"
Love is the impulse which directs the world,
And all things know it and obey its power.
Man, in the maelstrom of his passions whirled;
The bee that takes the pollen to the flower;
The earth, uplifting her bare, pulsing breast
To fervent kisses of the amorous sun;--
Each but obeys creative Love's behest,
Which everywhere instinctively is done.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
There is no passion that more excites us to every thing that is noble and generous than virtuous Love.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
If dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am I lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Sometimes love makes you selfish. Sometimes it makes you stupid. Sometimes it reminds you why you love your gun.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Cerulean Sins
Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once.
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita
You can't make me love you.
NEIL GAIMAN
Coraline
Neil Gaiman (born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, films, and nonfiction. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels such as American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.