By Category: Love

“She kissed me gentle, kissed me slow, kissed me like Grace Kelly, a porcelain princess, a lace-curtain lesbian.

I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life.... Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.”

-Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Dorothy Allison

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“look i'm standing naked before you
don't you want more than my sex
i can scream as loud as your last one
but i can't claim innocence.”

-Leather, Tori Amos

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“How delicious an instrument is woman, when artfully played upon; how capable is she of producing the most exquisite harmonies, or executing the most divine erotic pleasures.”

-The Anaga Ranga

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“Icy claws with tender touches are the gifts she brings to me. Swallowed in the mindless void of sex and misery.”

-Anonymous

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“Missing someone feels like the earth crumbles beneath you -- you are falling with nothing to grab, and it comes when you don't expect it, and it never stops coming.”

-Anonymous

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“No-one to turn to
No-one to trust
The love in my heart
Just turns to dust.”

-Anonymous

Recommended by Ginger.

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“You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her.”

-Anonymous

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“all love like flame is fleeting
when there's no hope anymore.”

-Hope Vol 2, Apocalyptica

Recommended by Anna Kate.

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“And I'll be your girl, if you say it's a gift
And you give me some more of your drugs
Yeah, I'll be your pet, if you just tell me it's a gift
Cuz I'm tired of whys, choking on whys,
Just need a little because, because
I let the beast in and then;
I even tried forgiving him, but it's too soon
So I'll fight again, again, again, again, again.”

-Fast As You Can, Fiona Apple

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“Hunger hurts, but starving works,
When it costs too much to love
And I went crazy again today,
Looking for a strand to climb
Looking for a little hope.”

-Paper Bag, Fiona Apple

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“I was staring at the sky, just looking for a star
To pray on, or wish on, or something like that
I was having a sweet fix of a daydream of a boy.”

-Paper Bag, Fiona Apple

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“Unrequited love, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I had to see the advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meager, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions. In the world of stark physical reality it might call for the removal of my ill-fitting garments (in the dark or the bathroom, if possible: no woman wants a man to see her safety pins), but it left undisturbed metaphysical counterparts. My Plutonic vision of myself resembled an Egyptian mummy, a mysteriously wrapped object that might or might not fall into dust if uncovered. But unrequited love demanded no stripteases.”

-Hair Jewellery, Margaret Atwood

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“Reverie intrudes at intervals.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes, each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoiced. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him, finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it- wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.

The last time she'd seen him, when they'd gone back to his room- it was like drowning: everything darkened and roared, but at the same time it was very silvery, and slow, and clear.

This is what it means, to be in thrall.”

-The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

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“Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered, even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they said once, but we reversed that, and love, like Heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. ”

-The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

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“When she lowers her eyes she seems to hold all the beauty in the world between her eyelids; when she raises them I see only myself in her gaze.”

-Natalie Clifford Barney

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“There are places I remember all my life,
Though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places have their moments
Of lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I loved them all.”

-There Are Places I Remember, The Beatles

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“I bruise easily
so be gentle when you handle me
There's a mark you leave
Like a love heart carved on a tree
I bruise easily
Can't scratch the surface
without moving me underneath
I bruise easily.”

-I Bruise Easily, Natasha Bedingfield

Recommended by ashley.

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“So you wanted
To take a break
Slow it down some and
Have some space
Well fuck you too.”

-Song for the Dumped, Ben Folds Five

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“On my way to work I see this woman wearing a short shirt that shows her belly button. She has a rounded stomach, and the skin curving in makes her belly button look like a very deep hole. I'm walking with my Walkman on down Steiner, music loud in my ears for a Friday morning, and I feel a wave of desire to stick my dick in that deep dark belly button hole, to fuck the woman with the short shirt, to lay her down on the sidewalk and take her. She walks by and I walk by and I continue on my way to work. Of course nothing happens. But I can imagine so clearly what it's like to enter a woman, I feel like I've done it. My body is on hers, drunk off the conquest, sliding in slow: my hips, the push, the glaze. I think about that belly button girl and I melt because girls are so goddamn elusive, you can't tell what the fuck they're thinking, except I am a girl, and I know just what a lot of girls are thinking, I know what I'm thinking, and right now it's exactly this.”

-The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Other Stories, Aimee Bender

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“He kissed me. A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs.”

-Dangerous Angels, Francesca Lia Block

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“My heart is a teacup with hairline cracks. I feel like I have to walk real carefully so it won't get shaken and just all shatter and break.”

-Missing Angel Juan, Francesca Lia Block

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“I wanted to die, then. I wanted to destroy the body I was trapped in, become what she was, no matter what it took. No matter how much mutilation or pain. But he looked away, at me. He pulled my face down and pressed my lips against his like he was almost trying to suffocate us both.”

-The Rose and the Beast: Fairyales Retold, Francesca Lia Block

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“Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of the world I know; therefore I love her nose. Her ears hear music that I might sing the whole night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses, life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are.”

-Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

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“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you -- especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”

-Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

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“'You teach me now how cruel you've been - cruel and false. WHY did you despise me? WHY did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me - then what RIGHT had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, YOU, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - YOU have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - oh, God! would YOU like to live with your soul in the grave?'”

-Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

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