Quotes about love

‘He was just so afraid he wasn't good enough for me, that's all his braggin' was,’ Violet explained. ‘He didn't think he was good enough for anybody, he was tryin' so hard to show he was somebody. So it was up to me to show him he was somebody all by hisself – that's the first thing a woman got to do for a man. 'N of course there's no sense tryin' to prove somethin' like that standin' up. The least a girl owes to herself is to be comfortable about it.’

For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them. What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery. He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself.

‘She got too big a heart, that girl,’ Antek explained of Molly when John had left. ‘A guy can walk into her heart with army boots on.’

How you deal with it I must and will leave to you, not out of despair or resignation but in deference to my conscience, that broken clock which I believe is now chiming one of its occasional right hours. I will not question your reasons. It is enough for you to tell me that you wish to keep this distance between us, and it will always be enough. Know that a single word will bring me running, but unless and until it pleases you to give it, I will expect nothing, force nothing, and contrive nothing contrary to your wishes.

I desire you as deeply as I ever have, but I understand that the fervor of a desire is irrelevant to its justice. I want your heart on merit, in mutual trust, or not at all, because I cannot bear to see you made uneasy by me. Not for all the world would I do so again, and I leave it to you to tell me how to proceed, if and when you can, if and when you will.

“Remember when I told you, for the first time? You nearly threw me off the roof—”

“I thought you deserved it. You know, it’s an opinion I return to from time to time, whether or not a roof is available.”

“You’re a difficult woman, Sabetha. But then, difficult women are the only ones worth falling in love with.”

“How would you know? It’s not like you’ve ever been after anyone else—”

“That part’s easy. I started with the most difficult woman possible, so there was never any need to look any further.”

“You’re trying to be charming.” She squeezed his hand once, then pulled away. “I choose not to be entirely charmed, Locke Lamora.”

“Not entirely?”

“Not entirely. Not yet.”

Maybe this is going to complicate the hell out of things. So what? You’re the complication I want more than anything else. You’re my favorite complication.

Next came the sort of kiss that banished the world to distant background noise and seemed to last a month.

It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.

In science as in love a concentration on technique is quite likely to lead to impotence.

Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning.

I left Symons’s company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is represented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.

“Abjuring love? Real people don’t do that. Now you’re the one who sounds like someone on a stage. That’s not the real world. Real people follow their hearts, wherever it takes them. Real people refuse to be put into a little tiny box. You can say you love me or you don’t love me, it doesn’t matter; I know you have foresworn nothing except an existence you found intolerable.”

She really did smile this time. “Now you’re making me sound like a heroine. Be honest, Lucius. For all that you go on about the real world with its real people, you don’t really want to live in it, either.”