By Category: Love

“If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a whole lifetime, he couldn't love you as much as I do in a single day.”

-Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

~

“My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliffe's miseries, and I watched and felt from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not be seen part of it. My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes trees. My love for Heathcliffe resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliffe! He's always, always in my mind: not a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable; and-”

-Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

~

“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

~

“You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other until it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Love isn't brains, children, it's blood -- blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it.”

-Buffy the Vampire Slayer [television show]

~

“The reason I know what we are to each other is because we fight freely and almost constantly, about even the smallest thing. In fact, once we didn't speak for an entire week because he didn't like the way I loaded his dishwasher...I can't decide if we're exact opposites, or somehow exactly the same except for minor cosmetic differences. I do know that all of his friends hate me and all of my friends hate him. We drive each other crazy in ways that nobody else can even touch. We never bore each other. And we both realize what a rare thing this is.”

-Dry, Augusten Burroughs

~

“She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.”

-The Stranger, Albert Camus

~

“...so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all it's seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”

-Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

~

“You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.”

-Souvenir of Japan, Angela Carter

~

“It's like when you are excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means that you're happy too.”

-The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky

~

“Anna Sergeyevna, too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that in the whole world there was no human being so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little, undistinguished woman, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy, the only happiness that he now desired for himself, and to the sounds of the bad orchestra, of the miserable local violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.”

-The Lady with the Pet Dog, Anton Chekhov

~

“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.”

-The Favorite Game, Leonard Cohen

~

“I was by chance spared the sight of Renée dying, then dead. She carried off with her more than one secret, and beneath her purple veil, Renée Vivien, the poet, led away--her throat encircled with moonstones, beryls, aquamarines, and other anemic gems--the immodest child, the excited little girl who taught me, with unembarrassed competence: 'There are fewer ways of making love than they say, and more than one believes.'”

-Colette, as quoted by Dolores Klaich in Woman Plus Woman

~

“i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.”

-Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, ee cummings

~

“Sally gets out of the store as quickly as she can, marches toward the subway at Sixty-eighth. She'd like to come home with a gift for Clarissa, but can't imagine what. She'd like to tell Clarissa something, something important, but can't get it phrased. 'I love you' is easy enough. 'I love you' has become almost ordinary, being said not only on anniversaries and birthdays but spontaneously, in bed or at the kitchen sink or even in cabs... Sally and Clarissa are not stingy with their affections, and that of course is good, but now Sally finds that she wants to go home and say something more, something that extends not only beyond the sweet and the comforting but beyond passion itself... If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not, exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has not only to do with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half. She can bear the thought of her own death but cannot bear the thought of Clarissa's.”

-The Hours, Michael Cunningham

~

“I miss the kiss of treachery
The aching kiss before I feed
The stench of a love for a younger
meat
And the sound that it makes when it cuts.”

-Disintegration, The Cure

Recommended by Kristina.

~

“... do you know what the opposite of love is?
Hate, I said.
Despair, Sister said. Despair is the opposite of love.”

-The High Divide, Charles D'Ambrosio

~

“We never even kissed or looked into each other's eyes. Our lips just trespassed on those inner labyrinths hidden deep within our ears, filled them with the private music of wicked words, hers in many languages, mine in the off color of my only tongue, until as our tones hesitated, raced harder, syllables soon melting with groans, or moans, finding purchase in new words, or old words, or made-up words, until we gathered up our heat and refused to release it, enjoying too much the dark language we had suddenly stumbled upon, craved to, carved to, not a communication really but a channeling of our rumored desires, hers for all I know gone to Black Forests and wolves, mine banging back to a familiar form, that great revenant mystery I still could only hear the shape of, which in spite of our separate lusts and individual cries still continued to drive us deeper into stranger tones, our mutual desire to keep gripping the burn fueled by sound, hers screeching, mine- I didn't hear mine- only hers, probably counter-pointing mine, a high-pitched cry, then a whisper dropping unexpectedly to practically a bark, a grunt, whatever, no sense any more, and suddenly no more curves either, just the straight away, some line crossed, where every fractured sound already spoken finally compacts into one long agonizing word, easily exceeding a hundred letters, even thunder, anticipating the inevitable letting go, when the heat is ultimately too much to bear, threatening to burn, scar, tear it all apart, yet tempting enough to hold onto for even one second more, to extend it all, if we can, as if by getting that much closer to the heat, that much more enveloped, would prove... -which when we did clutch, hold, postpone, did in fact prove too much after all, seconds too much, and impossible to refuse, so blowing all of everything apart, shivers and shakes and deep in her throat a thousand letters crashing in a long unmodulated fall, resonating deep within my cochlea and down the cochlear nerve, a last fit of fury describing in lasting detail the shape of things already come.

Too bad dark languages rarely survive.

As quickly as they're invented, they die, unable to penetrate much, explore anything or even connect. Terribly beautiful but more often than not inadequate. So I guess it's no surprise that what I recall now with the most clarity is actually pretty odd.”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

~

“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”

-The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

~

“... But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.”

-A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick

~

“I'll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter...”

-Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

Recommended by K..

~

“Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality.”

-Unable are the Loved to die, Emily Dickinson

~

“I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male's totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. 'I mean that's pretty much what happens everywhere, isn't it,' she said. 'Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn't show?'”

-A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion

~

“If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics
I might be able to listen in silence to your concerns
rather than hearing everything as an accusation
or an indictment against me

I would tell you that sometimes
I use sex to avoid communication
it's the best escape when we're down on our luck
But I can express more emotions than laughter, anger
and let's fuck.”

-If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics, Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy

~

“His gentleness was unaffected by his pain. He didn't speak of the pain, never a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver, he'd close his eyes and clench his teeth. But he never said anything about the images behind his closed eyes. It was as he loved the pain, loved it as he'd loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me.”

-The Lover, Marguerite Duras

~

“It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.”

-After Strange Gods, T.S. Eliot

Navigation

Back to 'Quotes'
Back to 'Do You SI?'