c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope.
— Peter David, Tigerheart
Waiting is erotic
— Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française
Love, and you shall be loved.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
I don’t understand the hatred and fear of gays and bisexuals and lesbians…it’s a concept I honestly cannot grasp. To me, it’s not who you love…a man, a woman, what have you…it’s the fact that you love. That is all that truly matters.
— Al Pacino, Al Pacino
I’d missed him so much, it almost hurt. It started the moment I left the Keep and nagged at me all day. Every day I had to fight with myself to keep from making up bullshit reasons to call the Keep so I could hear his voice. My only saving grace was that Curran wasn’t handling this whole mating thing any better. Yesterday he’d called me at the office claiming that he couldn’t find his socks. We talked for two hours.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Slays
Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
One of the few downsides to being awakened is that we no longer require sleep; therefore we also no longer dream. It's a shame, because if I could dream, I know I'd dream about you.I'd dream about the way you smell and how your dark hair feels like silk between my fingers. I'd dream about the smoothness of your skin and the fierceness of your lips when we kiss. Without dreams, I have to be content with my own imagination– which is almost as good. I can picture all of those things perfectly, as well as how it'll be when I take your life from this world.
— Richelle Mead, Spirit Bound
I look at you, and I think about you, and ... I don't know. No one has ever confounded me the way you do.
— Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door
But I was youngand didn’t know betterand someone should have told me to capture every secondevery kiss & every nightBecause now I’m sitting here alone and it’s getting really hard to breath because tears are growing in my throat and they want to break out, but there are peoplewatchingand I just want to be somewhere silentsomewhere stillBut still I don’t want to be alone because I’m scared and lonelyand I don’t understandBecause I was alone my whole lifeMy whole lifeI was so damn lonely and I was content with thatbecause I liked myself and my own company and I didn’t need anyoneI thoughtBut then there was you .. ...So, someone should have told me that love is for those few brave who can handle the unbearable emptiness,the unbearable guilt and lack of oneself,Because I lost myself to someone I loveand I might get myself back one daybut it will take time, it will take time.This is gonna take some time.I wish someone would have told me this.Someone should have told me this.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Love was the most savage monster of all.
— Rick Riordan, The House of Hades
I miss us too. I always have and I probably always will. Sometimes there are no happy endings. No matter what, I'll be losing something, someone. But maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice again and again, day in and day out, year after year,says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.
— Emily Giffin, Love the One You're With
Choice or no, my heart is his.
— Beth Revis, A Million Suns
Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Okay, then I’ll just say I love you. There is nothing in this world more important to me than you are. I’m only content when you’re near. My whole purpose is to be what you need me to be. It’s not poetry, but it’s from my heart. Will that do?
— Colleen Houck
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Two seconds later, the sound of an alarm filled my ears. ''What did you do?'' I said over the noise as he backed up towards the bathroom door. ''The girl who gave you the note?''''Yes...''''I caught her staring at my lighter.''I blinked. ''You gave a child, in a psych ward , a lighter?''His eyes crinkled at the corners. ''She seemed trustworthy.''''You're sick,'' I said, but smiled.''Hey, nobody's perfect. '' Noah smiled back.
— Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer
He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.
— Ann Brashares
From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her more, and many a time since have I kneeled down in the darkness of the night watch and kissed the deck of that ship because I knew her dear feet had trod it. She was never engaged to me. She treated me as fairly as ever a woman treated a man. I have no complaint to make. It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes
It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.
— Chuck Palahniuk
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
— Anaïs Nin
Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.
— Nayyirah Waheed
Not like this. He wanted it to be real.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
If you listen to the wind very carefully, you'll be able to hear me whisper my love for you.
— Andrew Davidson
The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable,Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.
— Euripides, Medea and Other Plays: Medea / Alcestis / The Children of Heracles / Hippolytus
I would never let anyone else borrow my heart if I know there’s a chance in hell you might want it back.
— Colleen Hoover, November 9
He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
I could still smell her on my fur. It clung to me, a memory of another world.I was drunk with it, with the scent of her. I'd got too close.The smell of summer on her skin, the half-recalled cadence of her voice, the sensation of her fingers on my fur. Every bit of me sang with the memory of her closeness.Too close.I couldn't stay away.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
Please," he says. "I'm begging you to stop."I still. "I can't stomach your pain," he says. "I can feel it so strongly and it's making me crazy- please," he says to me. "Don't be sad. Or hurt. Or guilty. You've done nothing wrong." "I'm sorry-""Don't be sorry, either," he says. "God, the only reason I'm not going to kill Kent for this is because I know it would only upset you more.
— Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part
The truth was I knew, after all those flat January days, that I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and warriors coming to my door, besotted with love. I deserved pictures of my face in a thousand expressions, and the warmth of a baby's kick beneath my hand. I deserved to grow, and to change, to become all the girls I could be over the course of my life, each one better than the last.
— Sarah Dessen
A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Musgrave Ritual
I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
I just don't see why the past has to matter.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels
You think I'm cute?" He said thinkly, pulling on her hand.She was glad he couldn't see her face. "I think you're..."Beautiful. Breathtaking. Like the person in a Greek myth who makes one of the gods stop caring about being a god.
— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
Some people feel love in their hearts, Julie. Some of us feel it all way into our souls. We're the ones who can't forget.
— Judith McNaught, Paradise
If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
— Slavoj Žižek
Better to put your heart on the line, risk everything, and walk away with nothing than play it safe. Love is a lot of things, but “safe” isn’t one of them.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
So many believe that it is love that grows, but it is the knowing that grows and love simply expands to contain it.
— William Paul Young, The Shack
Love is blind, they say--but isn't it more that love makes us see too much? Isn't it more that love floods our brain with sights and sounds, so that everything looks bigger, brighter, more lovely than ever before?
— Susan  Fletcher, Eve Green
Falling into ruin was a bit like falling in love: Both descents stripped you bare and left you as you were at your core. And both endings are equally painful.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Unbound
I want my world to start and end with you.
— E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey
he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.
— David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran's heart pounded in his chest as if it was not big enough to contain all the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her.
— Neil Gaiman, Stardust
And when she at last came out, her eyes were dry. Her parents stared up from their silent breakfast at her. They both started to rise but she put a hand out, stopped them. ‘I can care for myself, please,’ and she set about getting some food. They watched her closely. 	In point of fact, she had never looked as well. She had entered her room as just an impossibly lovely girl. The woman who emerged was a trifle thinner, a great deal wiser, and an ocean sadder. This one understood the nature of pain, and beneath the glory of her features, there was character, and a sure knowledge of suffering. 	She was eighteen. She was the most beautiful woman in a hundred years. She didn’t seem to care. 	‘You’re all right?’ her mother asked.	Buttercup sipped her cocoa. ‘Fine,’ she said.	‘You’re sure?’ her father wondered.	‘Yes,’ Buttercup replied. There was a very long pause. ‘But I must never love again.’	She never did.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
I want him to love me as much as I love him.
— L.J. Smith, The Awakening
She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own. 
— Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
I could feel the warmth of his presence as if a soft blanket had been wrapped around my soul, around my heart. It held me and protected me. It sheltered me and I knew I wasn’t alone anymore.
— Colleen Houck
You have a beautiful laugh. Like the promise of tomorrow.
— Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn
Sometimes you have to learn to love what's good for you.
— Stephenie Meyer, New Moon
Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the windows which hope has opened.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.
— Leo Tolstoy
It isn't about love," Vee said. "It's about fun.
— Becca Fitzpatrick, Hush, Hush
On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
You don't have to say I love you to say I love you," you said with a shrug. "All you have to do is say my name and I know."..."Can't you hear it?" you said. "When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.
— Jodi Picoult
And he knew that at that moment, they understood each other perfectly, and when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say ‘be careful’ or ‘don’t do it’, but she would accept his decision because she would not have expected anything less of him.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
What are you wishing for?' Grace interrupted. 'To kiss you,' I said to her.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Linger
Don't be afraid to lose him, because if a man truly loves you, he's not going anywhere
— Steve Harvey, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment
When someone you love says goodbye you can stare long and hard at the door they closed and forget to see all the doors God has open in front of you.
— Shannon L. Alder
He is the cheese to my macaroni.
— Diablo Cody, Juno: The Shooting Script
Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I loved him.I couldn't pinpoint what made me so certain, but I knew it then, as surely as I knew my name or the color of the sky or any fact written in a book.Could he feel it, too?Maxon broke the kiss and looked at me. "You're so pretty when you are a mess."I laughed nervously. "Thank you. For that and for the rain and for not giving up."He ran his fingers along my cheek and nose and chin. "You're worth it. I don't think that you get that. You're worth it to me.
— Kiera Cass, The One
He shook his head, just looking at me. - "What?" I asked.- "Nothing" he said.- "Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I`m not beau-"- "You are like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman."- "Never seen it."- "Really?" he asked. "Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can`t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It`s your autobiography, so far as I can tell."His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn`t even know that guys could turn me on - not, like, in real life.
— John Green
After dinner or lunch or whatever it was -- with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what -- I said, "Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let's give it up. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Let's go to the zoo. Let's look at animals. Let's drive down and look at the ocean. It's only 45 minutes. Let's play games in the arcades. Let's go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let's have friends. Let's laugh. This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us.
— Charles Bukowski, Post Office
Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.
— Jodi Picoult
Just knowing you exist changed the world for me.
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, God-Shaped Hole
When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
Kitten, your hands are heaven and your eyes are my home.
— Jeaniene Frost, This Side of the Grave
The room fell quiet. And as I read down the list of over one hundred and fifty eight-grade boys, I realized that to me, there had only ever been one boy.
— Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped
I’m sort of… coming off a bad relationship”“When did it end?”“Slightly before it started.
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
You have within you,right now,everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.
— Brian Tracy
You seem to think you have a choice," Cam said. "But you have it backwards. Love chooses you. The shadow moves as the sun commands.
— Lisa Kleypas, Married By Morning
love is blindand lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Falling In Love Is Like Owning A Dog.Throw things away and love will bring them back,again, and again, and again.But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.And in return, love loves you and never stops.
— Taylor Mali
...some things are better left in the past. And true things are destined to repeat themselves.
— Suzanne Young, The Program
I want you. I want you so badly I can’t stand it. When you left, it felt like the world got darker. Like I couldn’t truly see anything. Couldn’t feel anything.
— Rachel Vincent, Alpha
She had never imagined she had the power to make someone else so happy. And not a magical power, either--a purely human one.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
I’m not a warrior or a goddess,” I said at last.Adrian leaned closer. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re both.
— Richelle Mead, The Indigo Spell
I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue.Now, I can’t look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each lettter.Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has somehow become sacred to my lips.A name I won’t throw around lightheartedly or repeat without deep thought.And if ever I speak of you, I use the English language to describe who you were to me. You are nameless, because those letters grouped together in that familiar form….. carries too much meaning for my capricious heart.
— Coco J. Ginger
A gentleman holds my hand.A man pulls my hair.A soulmate will do both.
— Alessandra Torre
Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.
— Audrey Niffenegger
The only difference between falling in love and being in love is that your heart already knows how you feel, but your mind is too stubborn to admit it.
— Colleen Hoover, Maybe Not
To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.
— Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock
Love is a game of tic-tac-toe,constantly waitingfor the next x or o.
— Lang Leav
Prayer for LoveThank You, Creator of the Universe for the gift of Life you have given me,Thank You for giving me everything that I have ever needed,Thank You for the opportunity to experience this beautiful body and this wonderful mind,Thank You for living inside me with all Your Love and Your pure and boundless Spirit,with Your warm and radiating Light.Thank You for using my words, for using my eyes, for using my heart to share your love wherever I go.I love You just the way you are and because I am your creation, I love myself just the way I am.Help me to keep the Love and the Peace in my Heart and to make that Love a new way of life, that I may live in Love the rest of my life.Amen.
— Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
All the fires of hell could burn for a thousand years and it wouldn't equal what I feel for you in one minute of the day. I love you so much there is no pleasure in it. Nothing but torment. Because if I could dilute what I feel for you to the mil­lionth part, it would still be enough to kill you. And even if it drives me mad, I would rather see you live in the arms of that cold, soulless bastard than die in mine," Merripen said to Win.
— Lisa Kleypas, Seduce Me at Sunrise
Simon: So were you following me? Or is it just an amazing coincidence that you happened to be on the roof of a building I was walking by when I got attacked?Jace: I was following you.Simon: Is this the part where you tell me you're secretly in love with me?
— Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels
Dimitri's voice snapped my attention back to him. "That's Adrian Ivashkov." He said the name the same way everyone else did. "Yeah, I know.""This is the second time I've seen you with him.""Yeah," I replied glibly. "We hang out sometimes."Dimitri arched an eyebrow, then jerked his head back toward where we'd come from. "You hang out in his room a lot?"Several retorts popped into my head, and then a golden one took precedence. "What happens between him and me is none of your business." I managed a tone very similar to the one he'd used on me when making a similar comment about him and Tasha. "Actually, as long as you're at the Academy, what you do is my business.""Not my personal life. You don't have any say in that.
— Richelle Mead, Frostbite
When we first met, I didn't want to get involved with anyone. I didn't have the time or energy, and I wasn't sure that I was ready for it. But you were so good to me, and I got swept up in that. And little by little, I found myself falling in love with you.
— Nicholas Sparks
What sexual preference do you hope she has?” “Happiness.” Isnt that cool?
— Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie Bat
Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it’s only faith that gives love its strength and its joy.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch
Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark.It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Linger
Ah me, but where are now the songs I sangWhen life was sweet because you call’d them sweet?
— Christina Rossetti, Poems of Christina Rossetti
You'll never be able to let him go. You'll always feel wrong about being with me.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
Soulmate" is an overused term, but a true soul connection is very rare, and very real.
— Hilary Duff, Devoted
I think about you every second of every day and I don’t know how to get over you,” she says.“Don’t,” I beg her. “Please don’t get over me.
— Colleen Hoover, November 9
I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.
— Ovid
If you don't like Cinderella because she seems so "naive" and "weak," listen to this quote from the Walt himself: "She believed in dreams, all right, but she also believed in doing something about them. When Prince Charming didn't come along, she went over to the palace and got him.
— Walt Disney Company
Love doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third day.It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirt.It just has to be.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
Oh, don't mind me," came an extremely sarcastic voice near the wall. “You two go ahead and make out–I'll just sit here and bleed quietly.
— Julie Kagawa, The Eternity Cure
You make me smile like the sun, fall out bed, sing like a bird, dizzy in my head. Spin like a record crazy on a sunday night. You make me dance like a fool, forget how to breath, shine like the sun buzz like a bee, just the thought of you can drive me wild. Oh you make me smile. -Uncle Kracker-
— Uncle Kracker
I give her the only honest and true answer I have."You're where I want to be.
— Simone Elkeles, Leaving Paradise
I don't understand how I can know so little about love and how it works. How I can be so bad at it when it's all I've ever wanted.All I've ever known is about leaving or being left.
— Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places
I want you, Hank. I'm much more of an animal than you think. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you - and the only thing I'm ashamed of is that I did not know it. I did not know why, for two years, the brightest moments I found were the ones in your office, where I could lift my head to look up at you. I did not know the nature of what I felt in your presence, nor the reason. I know it now. That is all I want, Hank. I want you in my bed - and you are free of me for all the rest of your time. There's nothing you'll have to pretend - don't think of me, don't feel; don't care - I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul, so long as it's to me you will come for that lowest one of your desires. I am an animal who wants nothing but the sensation of pleasure which you despise - but I want it from you. You'd give up amy height of virtue for it , while I - I haven't any to give up. There's none I seek or wish to reach. I am so low that I would exchange the greatest sight of beauty in the world for the sight of your figure in the cab of a railroad engine. Amd seeing it, I would not be able to see it indifferently. You don't have to fear that you're now dependent on me. It's I who will depend on any whim of yours. You'll have me anytime you wish, anywhere, on any terms. Did you call it the obscenity of my talent? It's such that it gives you a safer hold on me than on any other property you own. You may dispose of me as you please - I'm not afraid to admit it - I have nothing to protect from you and nothing to reserve. You think that this is a threat to your achievement, but it is not to mine. I will sit at my desk, and work, and when the things around me get hard to bear, I will think that for my reward I will be in your bed that night. Did you call it depravity? I am much more depraved than you are: you hold it as your guilt, and I - as my pride. I'm more proud of it than anything I've done, more proud than of building the Line. If I'm asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it.
— Ayn Rand
All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
I think sometimes when we find love we pretend it away, or ignore it, or tell ourselves we’re imagining it. Because it is the most painful kind of hope there is.
— Rae Carson, The Bitter Kingdom
Dustfinger still clearly remembered the feeling of being in love for the first time. How vulnerable his heart had suddenly been! Such a trembling, quivering thing, happy and miserably unhappy at once.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
To love makes one solitary.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
And besides . . . I don’t want to leave you. Er, you guys.”He smiled, and it lit up his whole face. “Well, ‘we’ are certainly happy to hear that. Oh, and I’m also happy to watch our darling little love child dragon while you’re in St. Louis.”I grinned back.
— Richelle Mead, The Indigo Spell
True love always makes a man better, no matter what woman inspires it.
— Alexandre Dumas
There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be tested, even broken, some, irrevocably; it’s the endings we’re unprepared for.
— Katherine Owen, Not To Us
If he can't handle you at your worst then he does not deserve you at your best. Real love means seeing beyond the words spoken out of pain, and instead seeing a person's soul.
— Shannon L. Alder, 300 Questions LDS Couples Should Ask Before Marriage
Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.
— Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming
We looked at each other for a minute, not saying anything, but I could feel the air between us shift. It became thick, sultry, and tangible—like when the air changes right before a storm. I could feel its power envelop me as it brushed across my skin. Even though I couldn’t see it, I knew a storm was coming.
— Colleen Houck, Tiger's Curse
After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
Then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before...and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.
— L.M. Montgomery
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Soul connections are not often found and are worth every bit of fight left in you to keep.
— Shannon L. Alder
I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.
— Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement
Marie, let’s suppose that two firemen go into a forest to put out a small fire. Afterwards, when they emerge and go over to a stream, the face of one is all smeared with black, while the other man’s face is completely clean. My question is this: which of the two will wash his face? That’s a silly question. The one with the dirty face of course.’ No, the one with the dirty face will look at the other man and assume that he looks like him. And, vice versa, the man with the clean face will see his colleague covered in grime and say to himself: I must be dirty too. I’d better have a wash.’ What are you trying to say?’ I’m saying that, during the time I spent in the hospital, I came to realize that I was always looking for myself in the women I loved. I looked at their lovely, clean faces and saw myself reflected in them. They, on the other hand, looked at me and saw the dirt on my face and, however intelligent or self-confident they were, they ended up seeing themselves reflected in me thinking that they were worse than they were. Please, don’t let that happen to you.
— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.
— Tess Gerritsen, Keeping The Dead
—I don't want to lose you—Then why are you the one that keeps letting go?
— Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.
— Thomas  Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
Kisses open doors, I've noticed. That one gesture can unlock secrets, ease open feelings. It can't be prevented--these kisses just are. It's how they work. They break into basements you never knew you had.
— Susan  Fletcher, Eve Green
Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
What’s wrong is that every morning and every night, I lie in bed wondering why you’re not beside me.
— K.A. Tucker, Ten Tiny Breaths
You left with my soul in your fists and my heart in your teeth, and I don’t want either of them back.” ~Ben
— Colleen Hoover, November 9
I’m not the kind of man to bottle up my feelings, Kells. I don’t sit up in my room pining away, writing love poems. I’m not a dreamer. I’m a fighter. I’m a man of action, and it will take all of my self-control not to fight for this. When something needs to be done, I do it. When I feel something, I act on it. I don’t see any reason why Ren deserves to get the girl of his dreams and I don’t. It doesn’t seem fair that this happens to me twice.
— Colleen Houck
We all know interspecies romance is weird.
— Tim Burton
Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret. 
— Hermann Hesse
Everything happens for a reason and, something better will come along for me!
— Selena Gómez
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
— Franz Kafka
I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.
— Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe
That's the big picture, your happiness. And health. You should never care what a man thinks of you -- until he demonstrates to you that he cares about making you happy. If he isn't trying to make you happy, then send him back from "whence" he came because winning him over will have no benefit. At the end of the day, happines, joy...and yes...your emotional stability...those comprise the only measuring stick you really need to have.
— Sherry Argov, Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship
And I got out of there without punching anyone, kicking anyone, or breaking down in tears. Some days the small victories are all you achieve.
— Molly Ringle, Relatively Honest
Love is a force unto itself, sayyidi. For love, people consider the unthinkable...and often achieve the impossible. I would not sneer at its power.
— Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
— Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.
— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
— Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
I love you for who you are, not who the world thinks you should be.
— Libba Bray, Beauty Queens
Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
There is lust and then there is love. They are related, but still very different things. To indulge in one requires little but honeyed speech and a change of clothes; to obtain the other, by contrast, a man must give up his rib. In return, his woman will undo the sin of Eve, and bring him back into Paradise.
— Anne Fortier, Juliet
No human should mislead another by promising them something they know to be untrue.
— Santosh Kalwar
I know what I have given you... I do not know what you have received.
— Antonio Porchia
I wish the night would end,I wish the day'd begin,I wish it would rain or snow,or the wind would blow,or the grass would grow,I wish I had yesterday,I wish there were games to play...
— V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
You promised, Seaweed Brain. We would not get separated! Ever again!” “You’re impossible!” “Love you too!
— Rick Riordan
I don't care," said Seth. "I would have done it. I would have sold my soul for you. You and me...I told you. Something's always going to keep us near each other...even if we aren't together.
— Richelle Mead, Succubus Heat
He didn't marry you to become king. He became king because he wanted to marry you.
— Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
I want your most vital organ. I want it to be mine.
— Coco J. Ginger
There’s always that one guy who gets a hold on you. Not like your best friend’s brother who gets you in a headlock kind of hold. Or the little kid you’re babysitting who attaches himself to your leg kind of hold. I’m talking epic. Life changing. The “can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t do your homework, can’t stop giggling, can’t remember anything but his smile” kind of hold. Like, Wesley and Buttercup proportions. Harry and Sally. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. The kind of hold in all your favorite ’80s songs, like the “Must Have Been Love”s, the “Take My Breath Away”s, the “Eternal Flame”s—the ones you sing into a hairbrush-microphone at the top of your lungs with your best friends on a Saturday night.
— Jess Rothenberg, The Catastrophic History of You and Me
He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter.
— Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
Three years? That's a thousand tomorrows, ma'am.
— Karen Kingsbury
I love him wholly and unconditionally and without reservation. I love him enough to sacrifice a friendship. I love him enough to accept my own happiness and use it, in turn, to make him happy back.
— Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Katniss: I’m coming back into focus when Caesar asks him if he has a girlfriend back home. Peeta: (Gives an unconvincing shake of head.)Caesar: Handsome lad like you. There must be some special girl. Come on, what’s her name?Peeta: Well, there is this one girl. I’ve had a crush on her ever since I can remember. But I’m pretty sure she didn’t know I was alive until the reaping.Caesar: She have another fellow?Peeta: I don’t know, but a lot of boys like her.Caesar: So, here’s what you do. You win, you go home. She can’t turn you down, eh?Peeta: I don’t think it’s going to work out. Winning… won’t help in my case.Caesar: Why ever not?Peeta: Because… because… she came here with me.Caesar: Oh, that is a piece of bad luck.Peeta: It’s not good.Caesar: Well, I don’t think any of us can blame you. It’d be hard not to fall for that young lady. She didn’t know?Peeta: Not until now.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Set the standard! Stop expecting others to show you love, acceptance, commitment, & respect when you don't even show that to yourself.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain...Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing.
— Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever
Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.
— T.H. White, Ghostly, Grim and Gruesome
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.
— Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love
Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is soordinary that the whippers are in love too.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Adrian smiled and clasped my hands, taking a few steps toward me. "And as for who you are, you’re the same beautiful, brave, and ridiculously smart caffeinated fighter you’ve been since the day I met you.” Finally, he put “beautiful” at the top of his list of adjectives. Not that I should have cared.“Sweet talker,” I scoffed. “You didn’t know anything about me the first time we met.”“I knew you were beautiful,” he said. “I just hoped for the rest.
— Richelle Mead, The Indigo Spell
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.
— David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.
— Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
Don’t marry him. Don’t be with him. Be with me.
— Jenny Han, We'll Always Have Summer
I guess the sacrifice of my dignity is the only thing that will save us now. The things I endure for love. The Fates laugh at my torment.
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron King
The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
— Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood