LOVE QUOTES LIII

quotations about love

Ah, my friends, Love, like a froward boy, with his hands full of sugar-plums, still cries for more.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


Those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

The Shadow of the Wind

Tags: Carlos Ruiz Zafon


Days will come when the magic of the senses shall fade. And when this enchantment has fled, then it first becomes evident whether we are truly worthy of love.

T. S. ARTHUR

"The Evening Before Marriage", Orange Blossoms

Tags: T. S. Arthur


It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Plague of Doves

Tags: Louise Erdrich


This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.

MARCEL PROUST

Within a Budding Grove


What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Powerbook


Love is all there is, it makes the world go 'round
Love and only love, it can't be denied
No matter what you think about it
You just won't be able to do without it
Take a tip from one who's tried

BOB DYLAN

"I Threw It All Away", Nashville Skyline


Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

"Passer Mortuus Est"

Tags: Edna St. Vincent Millay


Love is the crown that glorifies; the curse
That brands and burdens; it is life and death.
It is the great law of the universe;
And nothing can exist without its breath.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"What Love Is"


Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Esmond


Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning.

NORMAN MACDONALD

Maxims and Moral Reflections


Marriage--what an abomination! Love--yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood--transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife--you know all about her--who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au dela? There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impossible ... the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there--only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal ... Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au dela.

GEORGE MOORE

Confessions of a Young Man

Tags: George Moore


For misdirected love, the attainment of its object is, indeed, the best cure; but it cures as the guillotine cures headache.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts

Tags: Ivan Panin


Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Written on the Body


Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.

M. C. BEATON

Love, Lies and Liquor

Tags: M. C. Beaton


The gospel of love spread among a sex for the needs of militarism and the labor market has filled woman with the spiritual hysteria of apostleship.

MARIAN COX

"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays


Love is said to be an involuntary passion, and it is, therefore, contended that it cannot be resisted. This is true in part only, for like all things else, when nourished and supplied plentifully with ailment, it is rapid in its progress; but let these be withdrawn and it may be stifled in its birth or much stinted in its growth.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, Jan. 16, 1795

Tags: George Washington


It is love that I am seeking for,
But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
That is not in the world.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The Shadowy Waters

Tags: William Butler Yeats


A man is only as good as what he loves.

SAUL BELLOW

Seize the Day

Tags: Saul Bellow