""In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.""
— André Maurois

"I can tell you I love you as many times as you can stand to hear it, but all it does is remind us that love is not enough. Not even close."
— Mark Andrus

"Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasinly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen

"We love because it's the only true adventure."
— Nikki Giovanni

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains,, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves."
— James Kavanaugh (There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves)

"Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of what you truly love."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Because of a great love, one is courageous."
— Laozi

"A: The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul.

Q: It always happens?

A: If we're lucky. And if we let ourselves be blind.

Q: Instead of watching out?

A: Instead of always watching out. "
— Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses: A Play)

"Sadness of love without release."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"What you love is a sign from your higher self of what you are to do."
— Sanaya Roman

"may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)"
— e.e. cummings

"then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE "
— Frank Bidart (In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-1990)

" One can give without loving, but one cannot love without giving"
— Amy Carmichael

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."
— Milan Kundera

"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."
— Edmond De Goncourt

"Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn't bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess - an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? 'Everyone admires us for our courage,' says one man. 'They have no idea what they're talking about.'"
— Laurie Moore

"There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect."
— Nikki Giovanni

"I have come to love you in spite of---" Do I want to be loved in spite of?...Does anyone?"
— Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng: A Novel)

"Once in an age God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false-imagining, an unreal character, but looking through the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,--loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be."
— Harriet Beecher Stowe

"If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have."
— J.M. Barrie

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."
— Christopher Morley

"Even if someone wasn't perfect or even especially good, you couldn't dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision."
— Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)

"When we truly love, it is never lost. It is only after death that the depth of the bond is truly felt, and our loved one becomes more a part of us than was possible in life."
— Oriental tradition.

"I love the me I am with him. I’m the girl who has Dave. I’m Lauren, Dave’s girlfriend. I’m someone better than Lauren Smith, who no one noticed till Dave came along. The thing is, that girl isn’t me and I know it. But when I’m with him, I feel like I could be her. That if something in me was just–I don’t know, shifted a little or something, smoothed down–people would think of me the way they think of Dave, and everything would always be perfect. I would be perfect."
— Elizabeth Scott (Bloom)

"After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances."
— Robert Hass

"A man can see a hundred women, lust for a thousand more, but it is one scent that will open his eyes and turn him to love."
— Cs Richardson (The End of The Alphabet: A Novel)

"I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Adult. You have become adult.
-- From the title story "Paingod"
— Harlan Ellison (Paingod and Other Delusions)

"The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."
— Allan K. Chalmers

"But love is much like a dam; if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or loved. But as long as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the damage he sustains is essentially spiritual, not physical; in such a case, the victim alone has the power and the responsibility of healing his wounds. He remains free: free to think, to learn from his experiences, to look elsewhere for human relationships; he remains free to start afresh and to pursue his happiness."
— Leonard Peikoff (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand)

"You can never love the same way twice"
— Hisaya Nakajo

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, "I want you to love her, too!""
— Christopher Morley

"The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.
"
— William Lyon Phelps

""The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...

"We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
"And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.""
— Lorrie Moore

"A happy love is full of quarrels, you know."
— Jean Anouilh (Antigone)

"Let us not love with words or tongue, but with our actions and in truth."
— 1 John 3:18

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
— George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)

"Cooking is an art and patience a virtue... Careful shopping, fresh
ingredients and an unhurried approach are nearly all you need. There is one more thing - love. Love for food and love for those you invite to your table. With a combination of these things you can be an artist - not perhaps in the representational style of a Dutch master, but rather more like Gauguin, the naïve, or Van Gogh,
the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love."
— Keith Floyd

"I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me, and Who's in charge?'"
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

"Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror."
— Truman Capote

""That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery."
— Lorrie Moore (Self-Help: Stories)

"I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words."
— Craig Claiborne

"and all the books you’ve read have been ready by other people. and all the songs you’ve loved have been heard by other people. and that girl that’s pretty to you is pretty to other people. and you know that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing “unity.” "
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Be very careful if you make a woman cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man's rib. Not from his feet to be walked on. Not from his head to be superior, but from the side to be equal. Under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved."
— A.W. Streane

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
— Anaïs Nin

"No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love."
— Thich Nhat Hanh

"Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak."
— Margaret Weis (Dragons of a Lost Star)

"I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep--leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)