Love
Expressions and thoughts on love in all its forms.
"It was finally becoming clear to her that love wasn't about finding someone perfect to marry. Love was about seeing through to the truth of a person, and accepting all their shades of light and dark. Love was an ability."
"It’s the way he had a cup of tea waiting for me when I woke up. It’s the way he turned on his laptop especially for me to look up all my Internet horoscopes and helped me choose the best one. He knows all the crappy, embarrassing bits about me that I normally try to hide from any man for as long as possible… and he loves me anyway."
"Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives."
"We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love. Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence."
"Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?"
"Love chooses to believe the best about people. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to fill in the unknowns with negative assumptions. And when our worst hopes are proven to be true, love makes every effort to deal with them and move forward. As much as possible, love focuses on the positive."
"There is an emotional promiscuity we’ve noticed among many good young men and women. The young man understands something of the journey of the heart. He wants to talk, to “share the journey.” The woman is grateful to be pursued, she opens up. They share the intimacies of their lives - their wounds, their walks with God. But he never commits. He enjoys her... then leaves. And she wonders, What did I do wrong? She failed to see his passivity. He really did not ever commit or offer assurances that he would. Like Willoughby to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.Be careful you do not offer too much of yourself to a man until you have good, solid evidence that he is a strong man willing to commit. Look at his track record with other women. Is there anything to be concerned about there? If so, bring it up. Also, does he have any close male friends - and what are they like as men? Can he hold down a job? Is he walking with God in a real and intimate way? Is he facing the wounds of his own life, and is he also demonstrating a desire to repent of Adam’s passivity and/or violence? Is he headed somewhere with his life? A lot of questions, but your heart is a treasure, and we want you to offer it only to a man who is worthy and ready to handle it well."
"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me..."
"I’ll tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell them it was my fault.”He looked at her, gold eyes incredulous. “You can’t lie to them.”“I’m not. I brought you back,” she said. “You were dead, and I brought you back. I upset the balance, not you. I opened the door for Lilith and her stupid ritual. I could have asked for anything, and I asked for you.” She tightened her grip on his shirt, her fingers white with cold and pressure. “And I would do it again. I love you, Jace Wayland—Herondale—Lightwood—whatever you want to call yourself. I don’t care. I love you and I wil always love you, and pretending it could be any other way is just a waste of time."
"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett)"
"I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again."
"If loneliness was a choice, what was the other option? To settle for second-best and try to be happy with that? And was that fair to the person you settled for?"
"Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space."
"Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more."
"True love is born from understanding."
"The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one."
"I will find you.In the farthest corner, I will find you."
"Would you just stay with me?Stay with you? What for? Look at us! We're already fighting!Well that's what we do! We fight! You tell me when I'm being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you're being a pain in the ass! Which you are, 99% of the time. I'm not afraid to hurt your feelings, you have like a two-second rebound rate and you're back doing the next pain in the ass thing.So, what?So it's not gonna be easy, it's gonna be really hard. And we're gonna have to work at this everyday, but I wanna do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever. You and me. Everyday."
"I’ve never been the one. Not for anybody.”He closed the distance between them. “You’ll get used to it.” He tipped her face up to his, kissed her.“Why? Why am I the one?”“Because my life opened up, and it flooded with color when you walked back into it."
"You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.But let there be spaces in your togetherness,And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.Love one another, but make not a bond of love:Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loafSing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.And stand together yet not too near together:For the pillars of the temple stand apart,And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."
"I touch the tip of my finger to his lips. "There are secrets in here," I say. "I want them out."He tries to bite my finger.I steal it back."
"Eric called Al's suicide brave, and he was wrong. My mother's death was brave. I remember how calm she was, how determined. It isn't just brave that she died for me; it is brave that she did it without announcing it, without hesitation, and without appearing to consider another option."