LOVE QUOTES XXIV
quotations about love
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
All the love and joy that a man has ever received in perception is laid up in him as the sunshine of a hundred years is laid up in the bole of the oak.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod, the Root, and the Flower
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"For What Binds Us"
Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER
"Rose-Time"
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Looking Glass War
Even kindergarten love is hard work.
JEFF HICKS
"Kindergarten love flourishes, 50 years later", The Record, September 3, 2018
For me the cosmic aeons lie complete,
O Love, between thy forehead and thy feet!
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past--oh so bright and clear!--oh so longed after!--because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall--or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable--more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring--it is his will that we should love.
VICTOR HUGO
Toilers of the Sea
Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885) is considered the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Les Misérables (1862) and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831).
I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.
NORMAN MAILER
The Man Who Studied Yoga
I could never take a chance of losing love to find romance.
U2
"A Man and A Woman", How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well--about a mile. Two miles.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Visit
If with love thy heart has burned;
If thy love is unreturned;
Hide thy grief within thy breast,
Though it tear thee unexpressed;
For when love has once departed
From the eyes of the false-hearted,
And one by one has torn off quite
The bandages of purple light;
Though thou wert the loveliest
Form the soul had ever dressed,
Thou shalt seem, in each reply,
A vixen to his altered eye;
Thy softest pleadings seem too bold,
Thy praying lute will seem to scold;
Though thou kept the straightest road,
Yet thou errest far and broad.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
To Rhea
In love, first please the eye, then win the heart.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
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
Let me tell you the story of right hand-left hand. It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: static. One hand is always fighting the other hand, and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand--Love--is finished. But hold on, stop the presses; the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes now, that's right. Ooh, it's a devastating right and Hate is hurt. He's down. Left-Hand Hate KO-ed by Love.
SPIKE LEE
Do the Right Thing
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods