"And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many."
— Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories)

"the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter)

"while time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world"
— Carson McCullers

"First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."
— Carson McCullers

"I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely."
— Carson McCullers

"I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?"
— Carson McCullers (A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud)

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"There is no perfection only life"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."
— Milan Kundera

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
— Milan Kundera

"for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

""Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

""Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.""
— Milan Kundera

"If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever."
— Milan Kundera

"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
— Milan Kundera

"The young man locked the door and turned to the girl. She was standing facing him in a defiant pose with insolent sensuality in her eyes. He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject--namely himself. It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly polymorphous. He hated her."
— Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)

"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."
— Milan Kundera

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, is it not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end?"
— Stephenie Meyer

"For some reason, my temper was hardwired to my tear ducts. I usually cried when I was angry, a humiliating tendency."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"I can't live in a world where you don't exist. - Bella Swan"
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"He is like a drug to you, Bella." His voice was still gentle, not at all critical. "I see that you can't live without him now. It's too late. But I would have been healthier for you. Not a drug; I would have been the air, the sun."
The corner of my mouth turned up in a wistful half smile. "I used to think of you that way, you know. Like the sun. My personal sun. You balanced out the clouds nicely for me."
He Sighed. "The clouds I can handle. But I can't fight with an eclipse."
— Stephenie Meyer

"I, the soul called Wanderer, love you, human Ian. And that will never change, no mattter what I become. If I were a dolphin or a bear or a flower, it wouldn't matter. I will always love you, always remember you. You will be my only partner. -Wanda"
— Stephenie Meyer (The Host)

"If leaving is the right thing to do..." And it had to be the right thing, didn't it? There was no reckless angel. Bella didn't belong with me. "Then I'll hurt myself to keep from hurting you, to keep you safe."
— Stephenie Meyer (Midnight Sun)

"Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can."
— Nicholas Sparks (At First Sight)

"Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it"
— Nicholas Sparks (A Walk to Remember)

"You're going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it's always their actions you should judge them by. It's actions, not words, that matter."
— Nicholas Sparks

"I love you more than there are stars in the sky and fish in the sea."
— Nicholas Sparks

"I don't know that love changes. People change. Circumstances change."
— Nicholas Sparks

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves."
— Anonymous (Holy Bible: The King James Bible)

"I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be."
— Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)

"You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"When you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through."
— Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)

"Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable, but her story and mine are different now. It wasn't easy for me to accept this simple truth, because there was a time when our stories were the same, but that was six years and two lifetimes ago."
— Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)

"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"Lines

I die but when the grave shall press
The heart so long endeared to thee
When earthy cares no more distress
And earthy joys are nought to me.

Weep not, but think that I have past
Before thee o'er the sea of gloom.
Have anchored safe and rest at last
Where tears and mouring can not come.

'Tis I should weep to leave thee here
On that dark ocean sailing drear
With storms around and fears before
And no kind light to point the shore.

But long or short though life may be
'Tis nothing to eternity.
We part below to meet on high
Where blissful ages never die."
— Emily Brontë

"These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume. (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene VI )"
— William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
— Robert Frost

"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
— Robert Frost (Robert Frost's Poems)

"The middle of the road is where the white line is—and that’s the worst place to drive."
— Robert Frost

"
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who  
think they talk sense.


"
— Robert Frost

"Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
— Sylvia Plath