Preface to Mudan Ting dated 1598; in The Peony Pavilion, trans. Cyril Birch (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. ix
Context: Love is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again. Love is not love at its fullest if one who lives is unwilling to die for it, or if it cannot restore to life one who has so died. And must the love that comes in dream necessarily be unreal? For there is no lack of dream lovers in this world.
“Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.”
Vol. I, ch. 13.
Source: Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
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William Makepeace Thackeray 69
novelist 1811–1863Related quotes
1850s, Two Discourses at Friday Communion (August 1851)
“So beautiful and fortunate
You're the one who hates to love
But he's the one who loves to hate.”
Love For Tender
Song lyrics, Get Happy!! (1980)
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: Turn where you will, everywhere, the man and the woman ever confronting each other, the man who loves a hundred times, the woman who has the power to love so much and to forget so much. I went on my way again. I came and went in the midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise myself in everybody. I have the same desires, the same longings as the ordinary human being. Like everybody else I am a copy of the truth spelled out in the Room, which is, "I am alone and I want what I have not and what I shall never have." It is by this need that people live, and by this need that people die.
Volume 3, Ch. 4
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)
Lecture IV, p. 107
The Duties of Women (1881)