"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding"
— Saul Williams (Said the Shotgun to the Head)

"Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident."
— Louis de Bernières (Captain Corelli's Mandolin)

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"When you love someone, you don't want to hurt them, even if they deserve to be hurt. When you love someone, you want to hurt them, even when they don't deserve to be hurt."
— Ellen Hopkins (Glass)

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail."
— David Sedaris (Naked)

"What a gift! To control the uncontrollable. To be loved. To own love. To own a love."
— Amanda Marquit

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"I was driving with Arrow the other day, and from the back seat she said, 'I wish we moved into that house we were going to move into.' A house we didn't move into because it was my boyfriend's house and we broke up. I said, 'I'm sorry honey. Why do you wish we'd moved in there?' And she said, 'Because if we moved in there, we'd find all the things we thought that we had lost. "
— Autumn De Wilde (Elliott Smith)

"I know sometimes tragic or humiliating events propel you into a better life, I've experienced that for sure, but it still hurts. It still burns. I think sometimes it hurts more because you can't wish it had never happened. It improved your life in the long run."
— Autumn De Wilde (Elliott Smith)

"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."
— Raymond Carver

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living."
— Jostein Gaarder (The Solitaire Mystery)

"Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart. If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world."
— Frank Warren

"I don't mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I'm not advocating suicide, oh wait, I guess I am."
— Amy Sedaris (I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence)

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever."
— Amy Tan

"Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.
-An-mei"
— Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)

"From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man."
— Amy Tan (Saving Fish from Drowning: A Novel)

"I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. "
— Amy Tan

"Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses. "
— Amy Tan

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."
— Zelda Fitzgerald

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television."
— Woody Allen

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"A good friend will always stab you in the front."
— Oscar Wilde

"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."
— Bob Ross

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
— Anaïs Nin

"People should fall in love with their eyes closed."
— Andy Warhol

"I like boring things."
— Andy Warhol

"We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society."
— Angela Davis

"Radical simply means "grasping things at the root."
"
— Angela Davis

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell."
— Joan Crawford

"I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make."
— Paul McCartney

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."
— Charles M. Schulz

"The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side."
— Scott Westerfeld

"The heart was made to be broken."
— Oscar Wilde

"If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution."
— Emma Goldman

"Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be."
— Bob Dylan