Quotes about love

Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence, like a new flower in bud, each petal first tightly furled around another, and then the natural loosening and unfurling, the opening into a bloom, the life of that bloom, must be something wonderful to behold; to see experience collect in the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, the weighing down of the brow, the heaviness in heart and soul, the thick gathering around the waist, the breasts, the slowing down of footsteps not from old age but only with the caution of life-all this is something so wonderful to observe, so wonderful to behold; the pleasure for the observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love.

Are we all with acute loneliness,

chronic patients trying to recover

the will to love?

...Sometimes the love

of another wounded one acts like a salve

which soothes the dying self but cannot heal

our lives. And perhaps this is what it feels

like to be human, and we are all well?

I say, Don't trust those men with better,

bigger versions of love if they refuse

the small, shabby sample they gave others

the tribute of believing it was true.

Every time she kissed him, every time he opened his arms and she crawled into them, felt like a miracle. Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before. (p40)

In the dark they are careful of each other, as if they know they are fragile, as if they know they can break. (p283)

It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love? (Chapter 16, p258)

Fancy lovers never last. (p81)

You can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.

You chose, as I choose

to despair, or not

on a given night or day.

That despair turned inside out

you called love.

When i say ours was a love affair, it is an expression of nostalgia and melancholy for the depth of our empathy. (p39)

Or was it possible that nobody's reasons could be all that clearly defined? Maybe men and women came together in ways as random and mindless as the mating of birds or pigs or insects, so that any talk of "reasons" would always be vain, always be self-deceiving and beside the point. Well, that would be one way of looking at it.

My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.