"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"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 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)

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love."
— Mother Teresa

"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 carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"
— e.e. cummings

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. "
— Plato

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

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."
— Tom Robbins

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"You must know... surely, you must know it was all for you. You are too generous to trifle with me. I believe you spoke with my aunt last night, and it has taught me to hope as I'd scarcely allowed myself before. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes have not changed, but one word from you will silence me forever. If, however, your feelings have changed, I will have to tell you: you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)

"It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"I heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved."
— Shana Abé

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain."
— Emily Dickinson

"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)

"So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you."
— Paulo Coelho

"Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.
(Translation: The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.)"
— Blaise Pascal (Pascal's Pensees)

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you."
— Jane Austen (Persuasion)

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

Dead Poet's Society"
— John Keating

"There is no pretending," Jace said with absolute clarity. "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there is life after that, I'll love you then."
— Cassandra Clare (City of Glass)

"Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything"
— Katharine Hepburn (Me : Stories of My Life)

"'I love you,' Buttercup said. 'I know this must come as something of a surprise to you, since all I've ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm. Your eyes are like that, did you know? Well they are. How many minutes ago was I? Twenty? Had I brought my feelings up to then? It doesn't matter.' Buttercup still could not look at him. The sun was rising behind her now; she could feel the heat on her back, and it gave her courage. 'I love you so much more now than twenty minutes ago that there cannot be comparison. I love you so much more now then when you opened your hovel door, there cannot be comparison. There is no room in my body for anything but you. My arms love you, my ears adore you, my knees shake with blind affection. My mind begs you to ask it something so it can obey. Do you want me to follow you for the rest of your days? I will do that. Do you want me to crawl? I will crawl. I will be quiet for you or sing for you, or if you are hungry, let me bring you food, or if you have thirst and nothing will quench it but Arabian wine, I will go to Araby, even though it is across the world, and bring a bottle back for your lunch. Anything there is that I can do for you, I will do for you; anything there is that I cannot do, I will learn to do. I know I cannot compete with the Countess in skills or wisdom or appeal, and I saw the way she looked at you. And I saw the way you looked at her. But remember, please, that she is old and has other interests, while I am seventeen and for me there is only you. Dearest Westley--I've never called you that before, have I?--Westley, Westley, Westley, Westley, Westley,--darling Westley, adored Westley, sweet perfect Westley, whisper that I have a chance to win your love.' And with that, she dared the bravest thing she'd ever done; she looked right into his eyes."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles. "
— Willa Cather

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."
— Stephen King (Different Seasons)

"Some people care too much. I think it's called love."
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?"
— Richard Bach

"If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down."
— Ray Bradbury

"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you."
— Roald Dahl (The Witches)

"For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

"Loving's pretty easy. It's letting someone love you that's hard."
— Rita Mae Brown (Riding Shotgun)

"If I know what love is, it is because of you."
— Hermann Hesse

"I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life."
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese)

"Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"I think we ought to live happily ever after. "
— Diana Wynne Jones (Howl's Moving Castle)

"How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?"
— Jodi Picoult (The Pact: A Love Story)

"When You Are Old"


WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars."
— William Butler Yeats

"Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw. "
— George MacDonald (The Day Boy and the Night Girl)

"You are in my blood. I cant help it. We can't be anywhere except together"
— Francesca Lia Block (Weetzie Bat)