Love's Work Quotes

“There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed; to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“This time I want to do it differently. You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. So what if I die. Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace. That I may desire again. I would be the lover, am barely the Beloved.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“The work equalises the emotions, and enables the two submerged to surface in series of unpredictable configurations. Work is the constant carnival; words, the rhythm and pace of two, who mine undeveloped seams of the earth and share the treasure.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“However, it was the opening passage which he said eased what he called his ‘problem of self-representation’: Who is entitled to write his reminiscences? Everyone Because no one is obliged to read them. In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman – it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely the desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so. Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another’s heart, and to listen to its beating … he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification …”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work

“Now, of course, I believe that it was Edna whom I went back to New York to meet. Edna was Jim’s parting gift to me. She is an annunciation, a message, very old and very new. Edna is, as she insists, my ‘home from home.’ Whereas the idea of the original home would arouse an agon of bitter ambivalence in me, the redoubled home has no colour or cathexis of pain inseparable from its welcome.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work

“I suppose Yvette's looks could be misleading, for she was canny and crafty enough to disappear into the environment when it suited her purpose. From the
moment that, unobserved, I first noticed and watched her, as she paced up and down the platform at Preston Park Station in Brighton, I knew that I was in the presence of a superior being. (...) It was the occasion of my initiation into the anti-supernatural character of Judaism: into how non-belief in God defines Judaism and how change
in that compass registers the varieties of Jewish modernity. (...) At dinner, Julius explained, "An Orthodox Jew doesn't have to worry about whether he believes in God or not. As long as he observes the law." Subsequently, I became familiar with the notoriously inscrutable Midrash: "Would that they would forsake Me, but obey my Torah.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work by Gillian Rose

“You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“Yvette practised the ars moriendi; I had long known that she would. The day before she died, her spirit intact, she listened with a look of beatitude on her simplified face to the story that I had brought with me from Leamington Spa, where I had just moved, to the Brighton hospice, where she lay in a room that formed a hard crystal of light, exposed to the raucous and merciless spring. It was a love story, and when I had finished relating it to her, and had sat quietly with her for several hours, she finally spoke out of the suffused silence, ‘You are now going to leave.’ Then, in her own way, she gave me her blessing: ‘You know how I feel. You know how I feel. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. All the very best. All the very best.’ I bent over her and kissed her on the lips several times, her lips reaching mine each time before mine touched hers.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work

“If I am mute, then so is medicine. It can no more fathom my holistic and spiritual matrix than I can master its material syntax. I must return to my life affair. It was never, of course, in abeyance: while I was in the theatre, it was waiting impatiently in the coulisses to reclaim its dancing partner for the never-ending Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk, yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life