By Category: Love

“Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious
of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the
waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
dancing.”

-East Coker, T.S. Eliot

~

“My male friends disdained my taste in women. Movie stars and fashion models left me bored. I dug career women in business attire. I dug that one skirt seam about to pop from 15 extra pounds. I didn't fall for the ones with perfect shapes and pert faces. I loved the smiles that didn't quite work and the sad eyes that couldn't lie. Mismatched features and oddly shaped breasts hit me hard. I was looking for sexual and psychological gravity.”

-My Dark Places, James Ellroy

~

“Thou art to me a delicious torment.”

-Friendship Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson

~

“Open your back door
I just need to touch you once more
I want to come over
To hell with the consequence
You told me you loved me
That's all I believe
I want to come over
It's a need I can't explain
To see you again.”

-I Want To Come Over, Melissa Etheridge

~

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the treehouse, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

~

“Trip Fontaine left crushed, knowing that all he could hope for was another night on the sofa beside Mrs. Lisbon. He walked across the lawn, unmown since Cecilia died. He sat in his car, gazing at the house, watching as downstairs lights traded places with those upstairs, and then, one by one, went out. He thought about Lux getting ready for bed, and just the idea of her holding a toothbrush excited him more than the full-fledged nudity he saw in his one bedroom nearly every night. He laid his head back on the headrest and opened his mouth to east the constriction in his chest, when suddenly the air inside the car churned. He felt himself grasped by his long lapels, pulled forward and pushed back, as a creature with a hundred mouths started sucking the marrow from his bones. She said nothing as she came on like a starved animal, and he wouldn't have known who it was if it hadn't been for the taste of her watermelon gum, which after the first few torrid kisses he found himself chewing. She was no longer wearing pants but a flannel nightgown. Her feet, wet from the lawn, gave off a pasture smell. He felt her clammy shins, her hot knees, her bristly thighs, and then with terror he put his fingers in the ravenous mouth of the animal leashed below her waist. It was as though he had never touched a girl before; he felt fur and an oily substance like otter insulation. Two beasts lived in the car, one above, snuffling and bitting him, and one below, struggling to get out of its damp cage. Valiantly he did what he could to feed them, placate them, but the sense of his insufficiency grew, and after a few minutes, with only the words 'Gotta get back before bed check,' Lux left him, more dead than alive.”

-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

~

“Perfect by nature
Icons of self indulgence
Just what we all need
More lies about a world that

Never was and never will be
Have you no shame? Don't you see me?
You know you've got everybody fooled

Look here she comes now
Bow down and stare in wonder
Oh how we love you
No flaws when you're pretending
But now I know she

Never was and never will be
You don't know how you've betrayed me
And somehow you've got everybody fooled

Without the mask where will you hide?
Can't find yourself, lost in your lie

I know the truth now
I know who you are
And I don't love you anymore

It never was and never will be
You don't know how you've betrayed me and
Somehow you've got everybody fooled

It never was and never will be
You're not real and you can't save me and
Somehow now you're everybody's fool.”

-Everybody's Fool, Evanescence

~

“I think you are blind to the fact
That the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.”

-Everything to Everyone, Everclear

~

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”

-As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

~

“Nobody ever complained? Girls were kind. No one ever told him, I could barely stay awake. If only you'd come faster, I could have ignored it altogether. Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face, on a November day in the rain.”

-Paint it Black, Janet Fitch

~

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

~

“They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly with one another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

~

“No matter! She was not happy, had never been so. Where did it come from, this feeling of deprivation, this instantaneous decay of things in which she put her trust? ... But, if there were somewhere a strong and beautiful creature, a valiant nature full of passion and delicacy in equal measure, the heart of a poet in the figure of an angel, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding to the skies elegiac epithalamia, why should she not, fortuitously, find such a one? What an impossibility! Nothing, anyway, was worth that great quest; it was all lies! Every smile concealed the yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every satisfaction brought its nausea, and even the most perfect kisses only leave upon the lips a fantastical craving for supreme pleasure.”

-Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

~

“They exchanged notes, like children. My grandfather made his out of newspaper clippings and dropped them in her woven baskets, into which he knew only she would dare stick a hand. Meet me under the wooden bridge, and i will show you things you have never, ever seen. The 'M' was taken from the army that would take his mother's life: GERMAN FRONT ADVANCES ON SOVIET BORDER; the 'eet' from their approaching warships: NAZI FLEET DEFEATS FRENCH AT LESACS; the 'me' from the peninsula they were blue-eyeing: GERMANS SURROUND CRIMEA; the 'und' from too little, too late: AMERICAN WAR FUNDS REACH ENGLAND; the 'er' from the dog of dogs: HITLER RENDERS NONAGGRESSION PACT INOPERATIVE... and so on, and so on, each not a collage of love that could never be, and war that could.”

-Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer

~

“This was the world in which she grew and he aged. They made for themselves a sanctuary from Trachimbrod, a habitat completely unlike the rest of the world. No hateful words were ever spoken, and no hands raised. More than that, no angry words were ever spoken, and nothing was denied. But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.”

-Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer

~

“I will set you free, to roam in lands far away, and hope you return. If and when you do come back, I shall hold you, and kiss you to make my world right. And then I will set you free once more.”

-Anne Forehand

~

“You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.”

-A Room With A View, E.M. Forster

~

“It was not only her profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require, and which seemed to deny all the gentleness of gesture and discreetness of permitted caress that so attracted her in Charles. She had once or twice seen animals couple; the violence haunted her mind.”

-The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles

~

“Will you be my anchor
When there is no-one around to hold me down
Will you be my anchor
I know you're not the answer.”

-Angel At My Table, The Frames

Recommended by Ronan.

~

“To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

-The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm

~

“When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt -- we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.”

-Maya, Jostein Gaarder

~

“In a perfect, perfect world you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you'll never see again.

Until walking (waking? calling?) on your own is unsupportable.”

-Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman

~

“Know that diamonds and roses

are as uncomfortable when they tumble from

one's lips as toads and frogs:

colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”

-Instructions, Neil Gaiman

~

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.”

-The Sandman, Neil Gaiman

~

“I will lie for you
Beg and steal for you
I will crawl on hands and knees until you see
You're just like me

Violate all the love that I'm missing
Throw away all the pain that I'm living
You will believe in me
And I can never be ignored

I would die for you
I would kill for you
I will steal for you
I'd do time for you
I will wait for you
I'd make room for you
I'd sail ships for you
To be close to you
To be part of you
'Cause I believe in you
I believe in you
I would die for you.”

-#1 Crush, Garbage

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