By Category: Love

“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has not overcome them.”

-Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung

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“And you have the same power to fascinate him, something a girl’s not supposed to acknowledge, for this particular expression of power makes her, in popular parlance, a prick tease (the more equivalent of, say, scab labor). But being able to capture his focus so completely works on you like a drug, and you’re blighted by the power of it. You can hold his entire being rapt for as long as you care to. You can feel his eyes on you, almost feeding off your form and movements. Even stepping from his car for a movie, you catch him staring at the curve of your calf. Or in the deep cauldron of the theater, he pinches your small wrist as if measuring it, turning it in his hands in a kind of wonder till you feel airy-boned as a bird.”

-Cherry, Mary Karr

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“Hell is not a place, it's a state of mind and body. It's an obsession with a voice, a face, a name...”

-Phantom, Susan Kay

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“My mind has touched the farthest horizons of mortal imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand. And yet, like Faust, I look in vain, I learn in vain... For as long as I live, no woman will ever look on me in love.”

-Phantom, Susan Kay

Recommended by Sibyl.

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“Simple words can be reduced to obscenities by my tongue, can they not? Wife... husband... love?”

-Phantom, Susan Kay

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“There are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.”

-Kill Bill Vol. 2 [movie]

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“This is how to bully a man; this is a how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if that doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quickly so that it doesn't fall on you.”

-Girl, Jamaica Kincaid

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“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all of the time, a kind of sweet hurtful ache. She would have died for him.”

-It, Stephen King

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“She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only know complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometri said that sometimes just to paint a head, you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

-The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

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“He wanted to efface her from the photograph of his life not because he had not loved her but because he had. He had erased her, her and his love for her, he had scratched out her image until he had made it disappear as the party propaganda section had made Clementis disappear from the balcony where Gottwald had given his historic speech. Mirek rewrote history just like the Communisty Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

How long did he stay in front of the railroad station?

And what did this stop mean?

It meant nothing.

He immediately wiped it from his mind, so that now he no longer remembers the small white house with the begonias. Again the world's space was merely an obstacle slowing down his activity.”

-The Book of Laughter, Milan Kundera

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“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood. In Prague she was dependent on Tomas only when it came to the heart; here she was depended on him for everything. What would happen to her here if he abandoned her? Would she have to live her whole life in fear of losing him?

She told herself: Their acquaintance had been based on an error from the start. The copy of Anna Karenina under her arm amounted to false papers; it had given Tomas the wrong idea. In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak. She was like Dubcek, who made a thirty-second pause in the middle of a sentence; she was like her country, which stuttered, gasped for breath, could not speak.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

And having told herself all this, she pressed her face against Karenin's furry head and said, 'Sorry, Karenin. It looks as though you're going to have to move again.'”

-The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

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“I'm sorry to say this but those who are most worthy of love are never made happy by it. Do you still think men love the way we do? No... men enjoy the happiness they feel. We can only enjoy the happiness we give. They are not capable of devoting themselves exclusively to one person. So to hope to be made happy by love is a certain cause of grief.”

-Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

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“And then she realized that his presence was the wall, his presence was destroying her.”

-Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

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“I didn't realize that when you really love, there's no freedom at all, except to die.”

-Le Divorce [movie]

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“Let me be the only one
To keep you from the cold.
Now the floor of heav'n is laid,
Its stars of brightest glow.
They shine for you.
They shine for you.
They burn for all to see.
Come into these arms again
And set this spirit free.”

-Love Song For A Vampire, Annie Lennox

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“A returned love letter is written in the most violent language, by your own hand.”

-Here Kitty Kitty, Jardine Libaire

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“Poor wrapper that damped
my fantastical star, parchment gray and mournful
of what I loved once but love no more!”

-New Heart, Federico García Lorca

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“(Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas,
mi alma en fotografías y azucenas,
y en las ondas oscuras de tu andar
quiero, amor mío, amor mío, dejar,
violín y sepulcro, las cintas del vals)

I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in photographs and lilies,
And in the dark wake of your footsteps,
My love, my love, I will have to leave
Violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons.”

-Pequeño Vals Vienés (Little Viennese Waltz), Federico García Lorca

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“We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”

-Uses of the Erotic: The erotic as Power., Audre Lorde

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“I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.”

-The Letter, Amy Lowell

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“To care about someone is to give them the power to hurt you.”

-Matt Margolis

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“I would have told her then
she was the only thing
that I could love in this dying world
but the simple word 'love' itself
already died and went away.”

-Coma Black, Marilyn Manson

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“Although he does not know it, Ray Porter fucks Mirabelle so he can be close to someone. He finds it difficult to hold her hand; he cannot stop in the street and spontaneously hug her, but his intercourse with her puts him in proximity to her. It presses his flesh against hers and his body mistakes her flesh for mind. Mirabelle, on the other hand, is laying down her life for him. Every time she jack-knifes her legs open, every time she rolls on her side and pulls her knees up so he can enter her, she sacrifices a bit of herself, she gives him a little more of her that he cannot return. Ray, not understanding that what he is taking from her is torn from her, believes that the arrangement is fair. He treats her beautifully. He has begun to buy her small gifts. He is always thoughtful toward her, and never presses her if she isn't in the mood. He mistakes his actions for kindness. Mirabelle is not sophisticated enough to understand what is happening to her, and Ray Porter is not sophisticated enough to know what he is doing to her. She is falling in love, and she fully expects her love to be returned once Mr. Porter comes to his senses. But right now, he is using the hours with her as a portal to his own need for propinquity.”

-Shop Girl, Steve Martin

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“Mirabelle informs Ray that though she is cautious, perhaps she has met somebody. 'I tell him about my medication and he doesn't care,' she says. This is the moment Ray has always known is coming, when she succumbs to the unrestricted, unbounded, and free-flowing passion of someone who is her peer. In spite of its predictability, he still feels this moment as a loss, and a curious one: how is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her?
”

-Shop Girl, Steve Martin

~

“Then the worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turns to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
but none, I think, do there embrace.”

-To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell

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