what are some of your favorite quotes about love?
“I love you. I want us both to eat well.” (Christopher Citro, ‘Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks’)
“Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.” (Robert Hass, ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’)
“I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.” (John Keats, letter to franny Brawne)
“It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul.” (Simone Weil, ‘The Love of God and Affliction’)
(Roja Dove, in an interview for The Cut)
“There was once a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her-immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.When I met Ana I knew:I loved her to the point of invention.” (Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House)
(Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
“ …but I love you, you know, down to my last, best word.” (Marilyn Hacker, from Section III in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons)
(Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the Nature of Love’)
“Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel with delicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud.” (Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence)
“Come, let me tell you about my infinite loneliness.It could never have foreseen this incursion of your shape.Such is the nature of love.” (Sohrab Sepehri, ‘The Way to the Orchard’)
(Adonis, ‘Transformations of the Lover’)
“I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you.” (Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West)
“The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, ‘Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.’ For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed.” (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
“You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he went on. “One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the one or two for butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince)
“What I feel for you—it beats words. It beats worlds. I promise.” (Katherine Mansfield, Collected Letters)
(June Jordan, Haruko/Love Poems)
“Life was alone, no name, no memory. It had hands, but no one to touch. It had a tongue, but no one to talk to. Life was one, and one was none. Then desire drew his bow. The arrow of desire split life down the middle, and life was two. When they caught sight of each other, they laughed. When they touched each other, they laughed again.” (Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
“Listen, love, I lift my hands—listen: there’s a rustling…Listen, love, I close my eyes,and even that makes sounds to reach you.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Silence’)
“I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, “Will you bring me a glass of water?” I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, “Do you remember when you were a little boy and you would ask your mama to bring you a glass of water?” Yeah. “You know how half the time you weren’t even thirsty. You just wanted that hand that was attached to that glass that was attached to that person you just wanted to stay there until you fell asleep.” She took the glass of water that I brought her and just sat it down full on the table next to her. Wow, I thought. What am I gonna do with love like this.” (Dito Montiel, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints)
(Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Tuesday and the Weather is Clear’)
“I love you, I move carefully so as not to break you, as you ring out inside me—so crystal-like, so entrancingly…” (Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra)
“you ever think about howenglish maybe isn’t our first language?the way I’m sitting right now is my first language. the way i bring myhand to your jawline is my first language.the way I become movement insideyour hands is my first language.” (Rachel Taormino, ‘You Up?’)
(James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk)
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” (Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit)
(Adonis, ‘Transformations of the Lover’)
“Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate.Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met.“Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll. The little girl was comforted.When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: “my travels have changed me… ”Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary it said:“every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.” (May Benatar, ‘Kafka and the Doll: The Pervasiveness of Loss’)
“When I love I become liquid light.” (Nizar Qabbani, ‘When I Love’)
(Ilya Kaminsky, ‘While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses)
“You rain on me - I sky you… I hand you my universe and you live me. It is you whom I love today. I love you with all my loves. I’ll give you the forest with a little house in it with all the good things there are in my construction, you’ll live joyfully - I want you to live joyfully.” (Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo)
“So how can I measure how much I love you?Except the way the willow measures the universe.Except the way your hair is tangled among the stars.” (Richard Jackson, ‘No Turn on Red’)
“In Middlemarch love enables knowledge. Love is a kind of knowledge. If Fred didn’t love Mary, he would have no reason to exercise his imagination on her family. It’s love that makes him realize that two women without their savings are a real thing in the world and not merely incidental to his own sense of dishonor. It’s love that enables him to feel another’s pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another’s lesson, one another’s duty.” (Zadie Smith, ‘Middlemarch and Everybody’)
(Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird)
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