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- I love you pretty baby
- You're the only love I've ever known
- Just as long as you stay with me
- The whole world is my throne
- Beyond here lies nothin'
- Nothin' we can call our own
BOB DYLAN, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"
O what a heaven is love! O what a hell!
THOMAS DEKKER, Blurt, Master Constable
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, November
Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.
TRUMAN CAPOTE, Other Voices, Other Rooms
The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
SYLVIA PLATH, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
- 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"
Why is the measure of love loss?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
If they substituted the word "Lust" for "Love" in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
SYLVIA PLATH, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.
TRUMAN CAPOTE: Conversations
The only everyday and eternal reality was love.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
- I’d go crawling down the avenue
- There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
- To make you feel my love
BOB DYLAN, "Make You Feel My Love"
Love had a thousand shapes.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
WILLIAM FAULKNER, "Beyond"
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
Among all methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when -- in this moment of deprivation -- the quest is for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage -- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
The end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Powerbook
Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that hapiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
TRUMAN CAPOTE, Other Voices, Other Rooms
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
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