Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

by Natasha Lunn

‘The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.’ (Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook)

It seems strange to me, how we expect so much from love, and yet devote so little time to understanding it.

responsibility to yourself ‘means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” ’

The best frame of mind to be in – for anything you want – is an ability to walk away from it, were it not to come right.