"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)

"Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"...his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks, I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence? "
— Audrey Niffenegger

"Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it’s a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth.

"
— Audrey Niffenegger

"Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"he was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. "
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?"
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly"
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenin)

"Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. "
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?"
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging this new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: 'No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectations, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.'"
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"As soon as she had gone out, swift, swift light steps sounded on the parquet, and his bliss, his life, himself - what was best in himself, what he had so long sought and longed for - was quickly, so quickly approaching him. She did not walk but seemed, by some unseen force, to float to him. He saw nothing but her clear, truthful eyes, frightened by that same bliss of love that flooded his heart. Those eyes were shining nearer and nearer, blinding him with their light of love. She stopped close to him, touching him. Her hands rose and dropped on his shoulders.

She had done all she could - she had run up to him and given herself up entirely, shyly, blissfully. He put his arms around her and pressed his lips to her mouth that sought his kiss."
— Leo Tolstoy

"He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began."
— Leo Tolstoy

"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"…[I]f they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her..."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?"
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"

I didn't say anything.

"
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"July 1936
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing - not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, "Life is so beautiful."

...

Yet, he thought, if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel - but it's staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give. "
— Hugh Laurie

"I would die for you. But I won't live for you."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Enjoy it. Because it's happening."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"It's just that I don't want to be somebody's crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"It was the kind of kiss that made
me know that I was never so happy in my whole life."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. Maybe that is what makes people "participate.""
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)