quotations about love
So being in love is like being hooked up to a perpetual dopamine drip, and you get a little hit every time you see the person or touch them or think about them?
SEAN ILLING
"This is what love does to your brain", Vox, April 23, 2018
A man is only as good as what he loves.
SAUL BELLOW
Seize the Day
Love is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing:
A plant that with most cutting grows,
Most barren with best using.
SAMUEL DANIEL
Hymen's Triumph
You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Four Quarters, 1970
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
ROBERT BROWNING
"Fra Lippo Lippi"
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
Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.
O. HENRY
"The Count and the Wedding Guest"
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
Love is an amazing magnet.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
Love is the building blocks of creation, love is the substance from which we are made. From love, to love, by love.
MUNEERA RASHIDA
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
All is fair in love and war.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
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
For me, love is the never-ending question. It is confusing. It is the answer, but it is also inundated with contradictions and complications.
JENNIFER LOPEZ
"Jennifer Lopez: Still Wild at Heart", Glamour
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
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
I am moved, still, at the power of love to set us on life changing courses, and to make our lives shine brightly with the light of God. It's dark out there, folks. Let's become the light of love, even more, where it is most desperately needed.
JANET FULLER
"Love is the light we need", Burlington Times News, October 28, 2017