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- The loves of men but vary in degrees--
- They find no new expression for the flame.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Isaura"
I don't believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys.
ELLEN GILCHRIST, A Dangerous Age
Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Dec. 20, 1810
The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN, Islanders and the Fisher of Men
- To find love round your ways,
- A shield in evil days;
- A robe that keeps you warm,
- As ermine, from the storm;
- To wear it as a jewel-flame,
- A cross of honor, with a royal name;
- To sit a queen, unmoved
- By want or grief--this is to be beloved.
CAROLINE SPENCER, "The Difference"
- Love is the only thing that pays for birth,
- Or makes death welcome. Oh, dear God above
- This beautiful but sad, perplexing earth,
- Pity the hearts that know--or know not--Love!
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "What Love Is"
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
ANAIS NIN, attributed, French Writers of the Past
- Our love is a harsh cord
- that binds us wounding us
- and if we want
- to leave our wound,
- to separate,
- it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
- to drain our blood and burn together.
PABLO NERUDA, "The Furies"
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
ANAIS NIN, diary, May 30, 1934
- I love Love — though he has wings,
- And like light can flee.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou"
Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
- Love is blindness
- I don't want to see
- Won't you wrap the night
- Around me
- Oh my heart
- Love is blindness
Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.
Love is the key to felicity, nor is there a heaven to any who love not. We enter Paradise through its gates only.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.
FRANK HERBERT, Heretics of Dune
I loved a being, an idea of my own mind, which had no real existence. I concreted this abstract of perfection, I annexed this fictitious quality to the idea presented by a name; the being, whom that name signified, was by no means worthy of this. This is the truth: Unless I am determinedly blind -- unless I am resolved causelessly and selfishly to seek destruction, I must see it. Plain! is it not plain? I loved a being; the being, whom I loved, is not what she was; consequently, as love appertains to mind, and not body, she exists no longer. I regret when I find that she never existed, but in my mind; yet does it not border on wilful deception, deliberate, intentional self-deceit, to continue to love the body, when the soul is no more?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Jun. 2, 1811
When love is reached through suffering ... it has a power it can never gain through innocence.
ANNE RICE, Memnoch the Devil
Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?
LEONID ANDREYEV, He Who Gets Slapped
- Love is clockworks
- And cold steel
- Fingers too numb to feel
- Squeeze the handle
- Blow out the candle
- Love is blindness
There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
IVAN KLIMA, Love and Garbage
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, notes, Queen Mab
- True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
- That to divide is not to take away.
- Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
- Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
- Imagination! which from earth and sky,
- And from the depths of human phantasy,
- As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
- The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
- Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
- Of its reverberated lightning.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Epipsychidion
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