Quotes about love

She often wondered whether cleanliness drove love away. Fastidious, she suspected that life itself was to be found in dirt and disorder, in unknown dark substances that she was hesitant to touch.

I will never see her, hard as I try to look past love. My eyes will always cast a light over her, and I will always think that this love, mine for her, is a dear thing. But it is as common as sand, as common as flesh.

As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.

The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird.

Nikolasha and Rosa had died for the romantic delusion: totalitarian love as reckless melodrama and desperate possession, an orchestra of trumpets and thunderbolts. Now he saw clearly that the real poetry of love was a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details.

He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography.

What’s important is not who you love but who loves you.

Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have.

‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her.

It was though I had been in possession of one of those small shells with Japanese flowers which are sold at street corners. When plunged into a bowl of water, the tightly sealed shell opens and the flat, dry, coiled-up, insignificant shreds of paper contained within float out and unfold their variegated and unsuspected splendour; with Gordon I had found my bowl of water.

I learned I couldn’t shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.