“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000)
You may become curious, though, about what happened to that painkiller should depression take hold and expose your love—whatever its object—as just one of the many intoxicants that muddled your consciousness of the human tragedy. You may also want to take a second look at whatever struck you as a person, place, or thing of “beauty,” a quality that lives only in the neurotransmitters of the beholder. (Aesthetics? What is it? A matter for those not depressed enough to care nothing about anything, that is, those who determine almost everything that is supposed to matter to us. Protest as you like, neither art nor an aesthetic view of life are distractions granted to everyone.) In depression, all that once seemed beautiful, or even startling and dreadful, is nothing to you. The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical; it is only an ensemble of objects represented to us by our optical apparatus and perhaps processed as a memory.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000)
“For what the most neglects, most curious prove,
So Beauty's helped by Nature, Heaven, and Love.”
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet
Canto II, stanza 18 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
Friedrich Hölderlin book Hyperion
Hyperion
Context: What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer
L’amour est le plus joli larcin que la Société ait su faire à la Nature; mais la maternité, n’est-ce pas la Nature dans sa joie? Un sourire a séché mes larmes.
Part I, ch. XXVIII.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)
“Everybody's afraid of love, because love is what hurts the most.”
Sharon Shinn book Archangel
Source: Archangel
Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 38, Escape
“He who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive.”
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) German poet
Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste.
“Sokrates und Alcibiades”
“In all the world, you are what I love the most.”
Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess
Source: Clockwork Princess
Pema Chödron (1936) American philosopher
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)