Lovely Quotes (page 207)
Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd. As herds of bellowing buses drive by. Love's anguish tightens your throat. As if you were never to be loved again. If you lived in the old days you would enter a monastery. You are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayer. You make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles. The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your life. It's a painting hanging in a dark museum. And sometimes you go and look at it...
Guillaume Apollinaire
I worship her, Alyosha, worship her. Only she doesn't see it. No, she still thinks I don't love her enough. And she tortures me, tortures me with her love. The past was nothing! In the past it was only that infernal body of hers that tortured me, but now I've taken all her soul into my soul and through her I've become a man. Will they marry us? If they don't I will die of jealousy. I imagine something every day...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
…there would be no powerful will binding hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature…And yet she had loved him- sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being.
Kate Chopin
Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.
Julian Barnes
When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean,And billows wild contend with angry roar,'Tis said, far down beneath the wild commotion,That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore.Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth,And silver waves chime ever peacefully,And no rude storm, how fierce soe'er it flieth,Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea.So to the heart that knows Thy love, O Purest,There is a temple sacred evermore,And all the babble of life's angry voicesDies in hushed silence at its...
Harriet Beecher Stowe
At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women
August Strindberg
I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to...
Elizabeth Gilbert
Each in the most hidden sack keptthe lost jewels of memory,intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,the fragment of public or private happiness.A few, the wolves, collected thighs,other men loved the dawn scratchingmountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.For me happiness was to share singing,praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:my life had no use on earth.
Pablo Neruda
I don't hate you. I love you."I love you, too. God, it's hell!"They decided to be more sensible. The next day they didn't meet in Widener. Elgin stayed in his room, and at three o'clock the phone rang. "It's me--Caroline."Oh God, you called. I was praying you would. Where are you?"In the drugstore on the corner." There was silence. "Elgin," she said at last, "did you have any orange juice today?"He ran, down the stairs, along the sidewalk, to the drugstore to have his orange juice.
Harold Brodkey