"Thou hast seen nothing yet."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"Even in bed my ideas yearn towards you, my Immortal Beloved, here and there joyfully, then again sadly, awaiting from Fate, whether it will listen to us. I can only live, either altogether with you or not at all. Yes, I have determined to wander about for so long far away, until I can fly into your arms and call myself quite at home with you, can send my soul enveloped by yours into the realm of spirits – yes, I regret, it must be. You will get over it all the more as you know my faithfulness to you; never another one can own my heart, never – never! O God, why must one go away from what one loves so, and yet my life in W. as it is now is a miserable life. Your love made me the happiest and unhappiest at the same time. At my actual age I should need some continuity, sameness of life – can that exist under our circumstances? Angel, I just hear that the post goes out every day – and must close therefore, so that you get the L. at once. Be calm – love me – to-day – yesterday.

What longing in tears for you – You – my Life – my All – farewell. Oh, go on loving me – never doubt the faithfullest heart

Of your beloved

L

Ever thine.
Ever mine.
Ever ours."
— Ludwig van Beethoven (Love Letters of Great Men)

"Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"The ability to reason the un-reason which has afflicted by reason saps my ability to reason, so that I complain with good reason of your infinite loveliness."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"The pen is the tongue of the mind."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

"All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased, I should have my will, and having my will, I should be contented; and when one is contented, there is no more to be desired; and when there is no more to be desired, there is an end of it."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"My heart is wax to be moulded as she pleases, but enduring as marble to retain."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (The Little Gypsy)

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
— Anaïs Nin (Winter of Artifice)

"You make me tremendously happy to hold me undivided - to let me be the artist, as it were, and yet not forgo the man, the animal, the hungry, insatiable lover. No woman has ever granted me all the privileges I need - and you, why you sing out so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even - yes, you invite me to go ahead, be myself, benture anything. I adore you for that. That is where you are truly regal, a woman extraordinary. What a woman you are! I laugh to myself now when I think of you. I have no fear of your femaleness."
— Henry Miller (A Literate Passion : Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller)

"Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric jolt at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment the man rests inside of her."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"Again I take a taxi to Clichy address, but feel that I do not want to go on loving Henry more actively than he loves me (having realized that nobody will ever love me in that overabundant, overexpressive, overthoughtful, overhuman way I love people), and so I will wait for him. So I ask taxi driver to drop me at the Galeries Lafayette, where I begin to look for a new hat and to shop for Christmas. Pride? I don't know. A kind of wise retreat. I need people too much. So I bury my gigantic defect, my overflow of love, under trivialities, like a child. I amuse myself with a new hat."
— Anaïs Nin (Incest: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails."
— Anaïs Nin (A Literate Passion : Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller)

"Anaïs, I don't know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me. [...] This is a little drunken, Anaïs. I am saying to myself "here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere." I remember your saying - "you could fool me, I wouldn't know it." When I walk along the boulevards and think of that. I can't fool you - and yet I would like to. I mean that I can never be absolutely loyal - it's not in me. I love women, or life, too much - which it is, I don't know. But laugh, Anaïs, I love to hear you laugh. You are the only woman who has a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance - no more, you seem to urge me to betray you. I love you for that. [...]
I don't know what to expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you - even the impossible, because you encourage it. You are really strong. I even like your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me."
— Henry Miller (A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953)

"This is strange, Henry. Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you. [...]
I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is all symphonic, and I am so aroused by living - god, Herny, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness. [...]
Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on. [...] I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy. "
— Anaïs Nin (A Literate Passion : Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller)

"Don't expect me to be sane anymore. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes - you can't dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you. [...] You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old - you are a thousand years old. [...]
Anaïs, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that's in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin?"
— Henry Miller (A Literate Passion : Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller)

"She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself."
— Anaïs Nin

"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."
— Anaïs Nin

"I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease."
— Anaïs Nin

"That initial anger she had felt turned to sadness, and now it had become something else, almost a dullness of sorts. Even though she was constantly in motion, it seemed as if nothing special ever happened to her anymore. Each day seemed exactly like the last, and she had trouble differentiating among them."
— Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)

"If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be crazy. Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to."
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption)

"Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them."
— Paulo Coelho

"Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused."
— Paulo Coelho

"All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Of all the ways we have found to hurt ourselves, the worse has been through love. We are always suffering because of someone who doesn't love us, or someone who has left us, or someone who won't leave us. If we are alone, it is because no one wants us..."
— Paulo Coelho (Warrior of the Light: A Manual)

"It's only those who are persistent and willing to study things deeply, who achieve the master work."
— Paulo Coelho

"Yes, my mind was wandering. I wished I were there with someone who could bring peace to my heart someone with whom I could spend a little time without being afraid that i would lose him the next day. With that reassurance, the time would pass more slowly. We could be silent for a while because we'd know we had the rest of our lives together for conversation. I wouldn't have to worry about serious matters, about difficult decisions and hard words."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence. "
— Abigail Adams

"My bursting heart must find vent at my pen."
— Abigail Adams

"As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)

"Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"Love is like a narcotic. At first it brings the euphoria of complete surrender. The next day, you want more. You’re not addicted yet, but you like the sensation, and you think you can still control things. You think about the person you love for two minutes, and forget them for three hours. But then you get used to that person, and you begin to be completely dependent on them. Now you think about him for three hours and forget him for two minutes. If he’s not there, you feel like an addict who can’t get a fix. And just as addicts steal and humiliate themselves to get what they need, you’re willing to do anything for love."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"Love doesn’t need to be discussed; it has its own voice and speaks for itself."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"I think that if we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we’re alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it's easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found."
— Cecelia Ahern (Thanks for the Memories)

"We can also allow our Soulmate to pass us by,without accepting him or her,or even noticing. Then we will need another incarnation in order to find that Soulmate. And because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness."
— Paulo Coelho

"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)