The Book of Love Quotes

“Bigger things, engaged in their own affairs, their own concerns, never notice when in consequence smaller things are made to suffer.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Time is a row of small and hateful stitches. No one slips through that door once it has been shut.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Ruth said, “Even if there were a lot of other things I wanted you to tell them and you remembered all of it correctly, it could still turn out something was the wrong thing for me to say. That’s the problem with being someone’s mother. You try to be helpful but it may turn out you were saying the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time, most of the time. I don’t want to make it harder. This is going to be so hard on them.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“He was fairly certain he was only ever going to be hungry from now on. For breakfasts, for bodily sensation, for love. But it was always best to start with breakfast.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“She said that to me once, but it wasn’t about beauty. It was about love. I asked her why she wasn’t married when all of her books were about love, love, love. She said romantic love, the kind she wrote about, was just one room and there were lots of others. So then I asked her why she didn’t write other kinds of books, and she said it was a very beautiful room and anyway it paid the bills. And then laughed and laughed.” “God, I miss her,” Jenny said. Mo wiped his face with his sleeve. His grandmother had said something else to him, too. She’d said lucky people found the work they were meant to do. Unlucky people found love.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“I have come to believe, though, that beauty is not so much a quality as it is rather a temporary state through which we transit, as if stepping in and out of a sunlit room. How tiring to have to be beautiful at all times, to remain only in that one room. Much like happiness, I suppose, though the happy ending must be more like a house into which we romance writers move our characters and all their baggage and boxes when at last we’re done with them. Poor Lavender Glass, the happy ending just always over another hill. In real life, of course, happiness is a room, too, like beauty. If we’re lucky we stumble through its doors every now and then.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“I have come to believe, though, that beauty is not so much a quality as it is rather a temporary state through which we transit, as if stepping in and out of a sunlit room.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Magic, like grief, could come welling up. The difference was how grief slammed into you without any kind of ceremony or invitation. Magic you could use. Grief just used you up.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Time pressed in on you from all sides and there was no door you could go through to escape what you became.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Ruth said”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“He still didn’t say whatever it was that he apparently had to say, so Mo kept babbling. Wasn’t this the way things always went? First you think you want to know some stuff, curiosity killed the cat, etc., but then at the point of discovery, you consider your hard-won knowledge (or one-step Internet search) and realize if you had known what you were going to know once you knew it, you’d never have googled it in the first place. Most of the time a cat was sorry he ever asked. Like the yearly roundups that websites do for the worst things online, the kind Rosamel always made him look at. Sometimes all you had to do was type a word or phrase (“ why” “Black” “gay” “sometimes I think about”) into Google and you saw what other people looked up and you were sad for the rest of your life.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“There are so many novels about falling in love and so few about finding a really good and rewarding job.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Time does not proceed directly. Is there anyone who knows this better than Malo Mogge? It hesitates, eddying about one’s feet, collects in shallow pools, and then goes gushing and rushing onward in a welter. There is only the smallest drop left before she has the thing she needs, that essential piece that left her so long ago. And yet, this small drop of time stretches out in an expanse as vast and empty as any land she has ever known.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“To beg the question does not mean to raise a question. It means you’re assuming a fact to be correct without giving evidence for the truth of it.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“I have come to believe, though, that beauty is not so much a quality as it is rather a temporary state through which we transit, as if stepping in and out of a sunlit room. How tiring to have to be beautiful at all times, to remain only in that one room.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Why do supernatural beings have to be like this? Give any high school art teacher enough power, and they’d probably dress exactly like Malo Mogge. Make you go to their weird underwater art project opening.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“We may not know every ending, but let us imagine Maryanne Gorch has a hand in it, and every love, though there may be ups and downs to keep our interest, is true and living. Every ending happy when the time must come at last for endings. Two men are kissing in a garden; the snow begins to fall again. Open the door, a voice says, and let them come in!”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“There was delight in this world, there was delight in change, in exploration, in flight. Bowie was not tired, yet, of discovery. A plan came to him as he fled. He would become something new. Perhaps in this way he might change the pattern.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“And karaoke was such a weird scene, anyway. People got up there thinking the goal was to hit the right notes. You could tell how much time they’d spent practicing, trying to perfect the song the way the original sounded. But performing was about a point of view, about how you felt. It was better to get up and yell the whole way through a song and really mean it than to try to get all the notes right. You knew it when you heard it.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“The hush of the trampled snow outside was a held breath, as if something extraordinary had happened, was about to happen again.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Ashthorpe five-piece.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“You could tell the long-termers from the people who had moved in over the past ten years because the shingles on their roofs were asphalt, the siding, if it was wood, a little scabrous.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Or perhaps this, too, was just part of what it was to have a body again. Just another room without a door.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“if anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Daniel fled and the wolf came after him, all helpful teeth and darkness.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Bargaining?” Malo Mogge said. “You see the moon in the sky above you and take it for a merchant in the marketplace?”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Kristofer had loved Avelot. He said it often. Only to herself did Avelot ever admit this: that she did not believe love was real. But certainly Kristofer wished to believe what he felt was returned. He had been intermittently satisfied by her pretense of it.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“There are wolves in the marsh. A saying when Avelot was alive. Now Avelot is dead but there are still wolves in the marsh.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“You couldn’t just give a big romantic speech and expect someone to remember it forever. First you gave the speech and then you gave the blow job. After that, there was no fucking chance they’d ever forget.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Every time I was ever on stage and we did ‘The Kissing Song,’ I was singing it for you. Every time I kissed someone, I wished that I was kissing you.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love