By Category: Love

“'I love you, Philip. I want to make up for all the harm I did you. I can't go on like this, it's not in human nature.'
He slipped out of the chair and left her in it.
'I'm very sorry, but it's too late.'
She gave a heart-rending sob.
'But why? How can you be so cruel?'
'I suppose it's because I loved you too much. I wore the passion out. The thought of anything of that sort horrifies me. I can't look at you now without thinking of Emil and Griffiths. One can't help these things. I suppose it's just nerves.'”

-Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

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“He remembered how passionately he had loved her, and he wondered why now he was entirely indifferent to her. The change in him filled him with dull pain. It seemed to him that all he had suffered had been sheer waste. The touch of her hand had filled him with ecstasy; he had desired to enter into her soul so that he could share every thought with her and every feeling; he had suffered acutely because, when silence had fallen between them, a remark of hers showed how far their thoughts had traveled apart, and he had rebelled against the insurmountable wall which seemed to divide every personality from every other. He found it strangely tragic that he had loved her so madly and now loved her not at all.”

-Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

~

“My need for you is near addiction.”

-May 17, Rod McKuen

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“But I fear
I have nothing to give.
I have so much to lose here in this lonely place.
Tangled up in your embrace
There's there's nothing I'd like better than to fall.
But I fear I have nothing to give.”

-Fear, Sarah McLachlan

Recommended by Ashley.

~

“I don't even know how long she's been gone. It's like I've woken up in bed and she's not here because she's gone to the bathroom or something. But somehow, I know she's never gonna come back to bed. If I could just reach over and touch her side of the bed, I would know that it was cold, but I can't. I know I can't have her back but I don't want to wake up in the morning, thinking she's still here. I lie here not knowing how long I've been alone. So how, how can I heal? How am I supposed to heal if I can't feel time?”

-Memento [movie]

~

“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

-Separation, W.S. Merwin

~

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”

-Absence, Edna St. Vincent Millay

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“'Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred.'
Pooh thought for a little while. 'How old shall I be then?'
'Ninety-nine.'
Pooh nodded. 'I promise,' he said.”

-The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

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“I am good but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am pretty but not beautiful. I have friends, but I am not the peacemaker. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.”

-Marilyn Monroe

~

“But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it -- taste it -- sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base -- everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”

-The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

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“I'm a far more flawed human being than you realize. My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has deeper roots. And that's why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. Don't wait for me. Sleep with other girls if you want to. Don't let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don't want to do. I don't want to interfere with your life. I don't want to interfere with anybody's life. Like I said before, I want you to come to see me every once in a while, and always remember me. That's all I want.”

-Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

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“this night, walk the dead
in a solitary style
and crash the cemetery gates.
in the dress your husband hates
way down, mark the grave
where the search lights find us
drinking by the mausoleum door
and they found you on the bathroom floor

i miss you, i miss you so far
and the collision of your kiss that made it so hard

back home, off the run
singing songs that make you slit your wrists
it isn't that much fun, staring down a loaded gun
so i won't stop dying, won't stop lying
if you want i'll keep on crying
did you get what you deserve?
is this what you always want me for?”

-Cemetary Drive, My Chemical Romance

Recommended by Catherine.

~

“--and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds . . . but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pèchè radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part oû nous ne serons jamais sèparès; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn--even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“...my Lolita remarked: 'You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions...”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

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“Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describe her face, her ways--and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds me when she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I close my eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a sudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“Sometimes, while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride - and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look - a gray furry question mark of a look: 'Oh no, not again' (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours - how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and - 'Pulease, leave me alone, will you,' you would say, 'for Christ's sake leave me alone.' And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“Somewhere beyond Bill's shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt arm-pits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen,with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D. -- and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long and cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my spectre shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

~

“All I could think about was the concierge, party to as many secrets as he was keys. He could have said something like, 'Miss, don't go up there, the gas men are seeing to a leak, come back in a few hours.' I would have listened.

I stood there, completely frozen, trying to comprehend an obvious situation. There were no cliches like, 'It's not what you think' or 'She's not important.' In a way I wish there had been because in those moments of silence I understood that he could not possibly love me and that he loved himself much more. He expected me to say something, to do something, but I just stood there in silence, staring at him. And then I walked away.”

-Beyond Indigo, Preethi Nair

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“I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.”

-Florence Nightingale

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“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

-Anaïs Nin

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“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds.”

-Anaïs Nin

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