Quotes about love

...my gaze meets the laptop screen and the words I poured out all afternoon. It began yesterday without any particular intent, just a quick reply to my sister. But today when I went back, the email suddenly took on a different form, more feverish, more poetic. I was seized by a storytelling binge, a lucid, cutting clarity, and from page to page the words joined together and frothed and flowed. And it is then that I realize I am not writing to Iris anymore. That the recipient is in fact myself, an as-of-yet unknown self, a me who has long ago gone back to Israel and is living my tomorrow-life in Tel Aviv, a distant me who will one day open up this file and read the words, and perhaps with hindsight have a better understanding of what is occurring inside me now, what I am going through in these mad and beautiful days. She will remember us as we once were, in New York, in Hilmi's Brooklyn studio. She will read the lines and remember how I sat here once on this couch, in December of 2002, like the bird perched on the windowsill all afternoon, and watched myself loving him while I wrote these words. (chapter 14)

People who lacked emotional engagement in childhood, men and women alike, often can’t believe that someone would want to have a relationship with them just because of who they are. They believe that if they want closeness, they must play a role that always puts the other person first.

She could be—he hoped would be—what he had always lacked: a center to the map of his life, that one, necessary fixed point from which he could navigate out into the world and by which he could always find his way back home again.

Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think. (p59)

I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love.

While lovelessness is not usually named by sociologists as an aspect of alienation, it may be the primary factor. For without relationships with significant others, meaning, self-esteem, a sense of belonging expressed in the establishment of norms and experienced as a sense of power cannot exist.

In the ancient bardic tradition the bards sang only of love and death. Certainly these twin themes encompass the whole of human experience. Loving, celebrating, and joining are the source of life, but they necessarily occur against a background of potential extinction. Thus, these themes become the spindle and loom of the poets’ weavings, for from the interplay of connection and disconnection come our most significant understandings of ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our tradition, our past.

As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love.

Love, Lettie thought, it hurts and gladdens us no matter what a woman's age. (p177)

If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.

The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return.