Quotes: Love

"But I don’t think it's love if the person disappears."
"I wouldn't say it's not love," he said. “But it's hard. That is a very painful experience."
Melissa Broder. The Pisces. London: Hogarth, 2018. p. 142.

"...love can never be between equals because love makes people unequal."
Adam Phillips. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. p. 162.

"...it is hypocritical, superficial and immoral, it is altogether wrong and unreasonable to attempt to idealize a love relationship with rules and formulae from those ideals that no longer are ideal and no longer have any real life. They are salt that has lost its power, and no matter how much of that kind of salt orthodoxy uses, it will not stop the rot."
Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]. On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1924). Translated by Anne Born. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. p. 86-87.

"The world is too small for anything but love, but it is also too dangerous for anything but truth."
Willis Elliott. Flow of Flesh, Reach of Spirit: Thinksheets of a Contrarian Christian. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995. p. 224.

Love is simply the feeling that I am grateful to be here and I am grateful you are here too, even if you’re on my fucking nerves, which to be honest some of you are. One impact of a society that gives some people unquestioned right to all the resources and power is that it creates out of those people a population who cannot understand the sheer love of being alive, the love of gratitude, the love of satisfaction and serenity. Everything is too little for them. There is not enough action. The mere act of being is not good enough for them. It never can be.
"When I Get Home," Carvell Wallace, Medium, October 19, 2021.

"...sometimes love means being a vessel for somebody else’s pain. Not because love should mean taking on someone else’s pain, but rather that love makes certain kinds of pain more bearable and teaches us more than the love, the violence, and the story that birthed us. Love can makes us people with wings.
Prince Shakur. When They Tell You To Be Good: A Memoir. Tin House, 2022.

"Once we start to believe that love is corny or sentimental, though, we shut ourselves off from this spiritual way of experiencing other human beings. When seeing the other as an embodiment of the sacred is regarded as a quaint or overly romantic idea, hopelessly out of touch with the real world, or, worse yet, when caring about someone else automatically seems to threaten our emotional integrity and need for independence, we experience a spiritual deprivation that is just as intense, painful, and destabilizing as the loss of material security."
Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 65.

"Who actually knew what love felt like? Who said it couldn’t happen suddenly like that, like a fuckin’ realization?"
James Han Mattson. The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves. Little A, 2017. p. 193.

"Love is a thousand things, but at the center is a choice. It is a choice to love people. Left to myself, i get quiet and bitter and critical. i get angry. i feel sorry for myself. It is a choice to love people. It is a choice to be kind. It is a choice to be patient, to be honest, to live with grace. i would like to start making better choices."
Jamie Tworkowski. If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2015. p. 32.

"Love is perhaps the desire to hand on something which one cannot keep."
The main character, Ludwig, in Erich Maria Remarque's The Black Obelisk (1957). USA: Crest, 1958. p. 202.