Quotes about love
page 87

“Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

“Because i've suffered. Because many times in my life i have tried to love with all my heart, and my love has wound up being trampled or betrayed.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Life, Suffering, Time, Heart

“She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.'
'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?”

Meg Rosoff (1956) American-British children's writer

Source: The Bride's Farewell

World, Solitude

“Because I miss them. Because I need them. Because I love them.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

Money

“You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people, if you don't serve the people.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Source: Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284

People

“But do we know how to make love stay?'
I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

Making love, Thinking

“[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"

(, interview with Budd Mishkin;, March 25, 2007.)”

David Halberstam (1934–2007) American writer, journalist, historian

Source: Everything They Had: Sports Writing

Feeling, Quotes

“You're still alive. And that means you'll love and be loved… and in the end, nothing else really matters.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Source: The Best of Me

“… She'd gone past interest, swung into attraction, burst through lust, tripped over affection, and was now skidding out of control into love.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Happy Ever After

Past

“About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all.”

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

Life, People

“Is love stronger when it let's go or when it holds on?”

Kamila Shamsie (1973) Pakistani writer

Source: Kartography

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Love is fragile. And we're not always its best caretakers. We just muddle through and do the best we can. And hope this fragile thing survives against all odds.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

Hope

“Love knows no limits to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Hope

“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Fate, Bad luck

“I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

Interview with Robert David Sullivan
Context: "I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'"

Thinking, Animals

“I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.”

John Steinbeck book Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“This perplexing, good natured boy who can spin out lies so convincingly to be hopelessly in love with me… and I admit it there are moments when he makes me believe it myself.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Boy, Nature

“Only God knows how much I love you.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

God

“But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Age, Soul, Science

“Don’t fuss. I love you just as you are, Mercy. I don’t need to swallow you whole, I don’t need to be in your head at all times. I just need to know that you’re there.”

Patricia Briggs book Frost Burned

Source: Frost Burned

Time

“I love her because she has become something more to me. She become my life.”

Melissa de la Cruz (1971) American writer

Life

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Life, Girl, Help

“I took a deep breath and said: “I fell in love with a vampire.”

And like that, I was blinded by light.”

Richelle Mead book Silver Shadows

Source: Silver Shadows

Light

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1875)

World, Light, Silence

“Hate is all that keeps us alive when love is gone. You’re almost there. Not quite ready to let it go yet.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Ever After

Hate

“Poor you, you have two cute girls vying for your love. Your life is hard.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Life, Girl

“You said go to her, and I let pride stand in my way. You said she needed me, and I didn't believe. You said love her, and I thought it would be easy.”

Francine Rivers (1947) American writer

Source: Redeeming Love

Way

“True love is taking the risk that it won't be a happily-ever-after. True love is joining hands with the man who loves you for who you are, and saying, "I'm not afraid to believe in you.”

Cara Lockwood (1973) American writer

Source: I Do -- But I Don't

“I think… if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Thinking, Heart

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Heart, Night

“The more powerful you become, the more others will find ways to master you. They'll do it through those you love and those you hate. They will find the bit and the bridle that fits your mouth and will make you yield.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: Ironside

Hate, Way

“It is a bad thing to have love and nowhere to put it.”

Kate DiCamillo The Magician's Elephant

Source: The Magician's Elephant

“Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth

Marriage

“I love nature, I just don't want to get any of it on me.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Nature

“Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Hate

“Therefore the best fortress is to be found in the love of the people, for although you may have fortresses they will not save you if you are hated by the people.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince

Hate, People

“I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader

Hope, Suffering

“Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Source: Finding Peace

Pain, Peace, Justice, Loss

“I've been in love. It's painful, pointless and overrated. - Damon Salvatore”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Pain

“Love weaves itself from hundreds of threads.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

“I plan to let Lysander rip the garment off me, make love to me in the dirtiest way possible, and then, while he’s trying to catch his breath, drop the big, bad bombshell on him and run like hell.
Bianka to Kaia”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Surrender

Making love, Way, Hell

“I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

“He’s very pretty. For a human.”
“He’s very broken,” said Magnus. “Like a lovely vase that someone has smashed. Only luck and skill can put it back together the way it was before.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Way

“And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Help

“If you were to turn into a snake tomorrow and begin devouring Humans, and from the same mouth you devoured Humans, you cried out to me 'I love you!', would I still be able to say 'I love you' the same way I do today?”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Way

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

People, Suffering, Hurtful, For Father

“Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns, incessantly, though he may pass through and seem to inhabit a world quite foreign to it.”

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian

World

“I am a glorious child of God. I am joyful, serene, positive, and loving.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

God

“Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Training

“The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.”

Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story

Source: Super Sad True Love Story

Training

“Oh, and I’m also happy to watch our darling little love child dragon while you’re in St. Louis.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Happiness

“True love means that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Pain, Happiness, Personality

“Love is on every side, and no one's side. Don't ask what Love can do for you.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“It was heaven. Forget angels, forget St. Peter and glittering harpsichords. Heaven was a dance in the arms of one's true love.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Angels, Dance, Forgetting

“Knowledge was more powerful than fear. Love was stronger than hate.”

Lauren Myracle book Shine

Source: Shine

Hate, Fear, Knowledge

“People are inspired to do remarkable things to find and be with the one they love.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Source: He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

People

“Love is a Christian word, Anjin-san. Love is a Christian thought, a Christian ideal. We have no word for 'love' as I understand you to mean it. Duty, loyalty, honor, respect, desire, those words and thoughts are what we have, all that we need.”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun

Understanding, Loyalty

“Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Life, Angels

“God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had and I lay on the bed in the room of the hospital in Milan and all sorts of things went through my head but I felt wonderful…”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

God

“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Variant: When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.
Source: Anna Karenina

Personality

“For a woman, love is the highest dream, and if a man promises to build a ladder tall enough to reach it, she believes him, hikes up her skirt, and follows him to the stars.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: The Shoemaker's Wife

Dreams, Star

“Good people protect people they love even if that means that pretending that everything is okay.”

Ron McLarty book The Memory of Running

Source: The Memory of Running

People

“I absolutely love you, Briony, and I am on my knees. So we're getting married - right? But say it fast before we get shot."
Only Jack would ask - if you could call it asking - in the middle of a battlefield, with a man lying dead at his feet.”

Christine Feehan book Conspiracy Game

Source: Conspiracy Game

Lying, Dead

“We are in love and meant to be together.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

Romantic, For Her, For Him, For Wife

“All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Life, Lie, Feeling, Freedom

“Ever since time began, people have recognized their true Love by the light in their eyes.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

People, Light, Time

“The truth of human freedom lies in the love that breaks down barriers.”

Jürgen Moltmann (1926) German Reformed theologian

Truth, Freedom

“Those who have a strong sense of love and belonging have the courage to be imperfect.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Courage, Sense, Strong

“There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.”

Lydia Davis (1947) American writer

Learning, Personality, Selfishness

“Love is many things none of them logical.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

“They kept the lie going, and the people loved it.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

People, Lie

“People who truly love us can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive us our worst sins. Rarely do you find someone capable of both.”

Jonathan Carroll (1949) novelist, short story writer

People, Forgiveness, Understanding

“Oh, how she did love that queer, common boy!”

Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden

Source: The Secret Garden

Boy

“The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

“Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Love and Friendship
Source: The Complete Poems

Friendship, Tree

“The Gospel does not abrogate God's law, but it makes men love it with all of their hearts.”

J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) American theologian

Men, God, Law, Heart

“remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf.”

Ali Smith Hotel World

Hotel World

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”

Anaïs Nin book Delta of Venus

Source: Delta of Venus

For Him, For Boyfriend

“Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving

“What looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.”

Pearl Cleage What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Source: What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

“The torment of love can transform people into wretched monsters”

Mathias Malzieu book La Mécanique du cœur

Source: La Mécanique du cœur

People

“Rose:i love you
Doctor:Quite right, and i guess if it's my last chance to say it… Rose Tyler…
(the doctor fades, him in his TARDIS, with tear tracks and a tear running down his cheek)”

Russell T. Davies (1963) Screenwriter, former executive producer of Doctor Who

Tear, Chance

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

People, Way, Feeling, Time

“There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

Time, Wise, Relationship, Cute

“When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves”

Sigmund Freud book Civilization and Its Discontents

Source: Civilization and Its Discontents

Lovers

“Someday, my love, you're going to understand just how much I care for you. You're my light, my warmth, my other half. I only feel alive when I'm with you. I love you." Caine”

Julie Garwood (1946) American writer

Source: Guardian Angel

Feeling, Understanding, Light

“Love not often, but forever.”

Joanne Harris (1964) British author

Source: Holy Fools

“How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Life, Books

“You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.”

Jonathan Carroll book Outside the Dog Museum

Source: Outside the Dog Museum

Lovers

“Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?”

Kate DiCamillo The Magician's Elephant

Source: The Magician's Elephant

Truth, World, Star

“Be what you are. No one who really loves you will stop”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

“Love is not about conquest. The truth is a man can only find true love when he surrenders to it. When he opens his heart to the partner of his soul and says: "Here it is! The very essence of me! It is yours to nurture or destroy.”

David Gemmell (1948–2006) British author of heroic fantasy

Source: Lord of the Silver Bow

Truth, Soul, Heart

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Variant: Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Source: Les Misérables

Life, Happiness, Romantic, love

“In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Journal entry (1938), quoted in the Introduction to a 1994 edition of Of Mice and Men by Susan Shillinglaw, p. vii
Context: In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

Men, Hate, World, Understanding

“I loved the feeling of talking and having somebody really listen to what I have to say. It was like a high or something.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Feeling

“If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1964)
Context: Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time — the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts… Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Revenge

“To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

"To Be In Love"
Variant: To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
Source: Selected Poems

Quotes about love page 87

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Quotes about love
page 87