c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It didn't make you noble to step away from something that wasn't working, even if you thought you were the reason for the malfunction. Especially then. It just made you a quitter. Because if you were the problem, chances were you could also be the solution. The only way to find out was to take another shot.
— Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
— M. Scott Peck
Westley: This is true love — you think this happens every day?
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
I say, “In the contract we said we wouldn’t break each other’s hearts. What if we do it again?” Fiercely he says, “What if we do? If we’re so guarded, it’s not going to be anything. Let’s do it fucking for real, Lara Jean. Let’s go all in. No more contract. No more safety net. You can break my heart. Do whatever you want with it.
— Jenny Han, P.S. I Still Love You
I don't understand dating.. and the other things that people do.. all I know is that you ought to find the one you recognize. The one who gives you four arms, four legs, four eyes, and has the other half of your heart. There's only one of those, so what are all the other things for? Like dating?
— C. JoyBell C.
Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion
— Simone de Beauvoir
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
— Jimi Hendrix
I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.
— Hayao Miyazaki
He’s dozed off again, but I kiss him awake, which seems to startle him. Then he smiles as if he’d be happy to lie there gazing at me forever.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. 
— B.F. Skinner
I'm not frightened. I'm not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.
— Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
He must love you very much,' Gavril said once I had my footing.I couldn't look at him. 'What makes you say that?' Gavril sighed. 'I've known Maxon since he was a child. He's never stood up to his father like that.
— Kiera Cass, The Elite
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Love is a drama of contradictions.
— Franz Kafka
Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.
— bell hooks
The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Then she did something so unexpected Nico would later think he dreamed it. She walked up to Nico, who was standing to one side in the shadows, as usual. She grabbed his hand and pulled him gently into the firelight. ‘We had one home,’ she said. ‘Now we have two.’ She gave Nico a big hug and the crowd roared with approval. For once, Nico didn’t feel like pulling away. He buried his face in Reyna’s shoulder and blinked the tears out of his eyes.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Friendship often ends in love. But love in friendship never. 
— Charles Caleb Colton
I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
When I first met you, that's what I remember. I looked up at the sky and thought, I'm going to love this person because even the sky looks different.
— Margaret Stohl, Beautiful Chaos
I am surprised how difficult for people is to say "I love you". They only say the three magic words when they are sure they will hear "I love you too" back. C'mon! Spread the energy of love without expecting anything! Cowards are incapable of expressing love; it is the prerogative of the brave
— Paulo Coelho
Perhaps all romance is like that not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. 
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid to love and to be loved because love tends to strip bare all emotional barricades. Without love, strength and independence are prone to losing every bit of their worth; they become nothing more than a fearful, intimidated, empty tent lost somewhere in the desert of self.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.
— Paulo Coelho, Aleph
She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
You dumb-ass," I crooned, kissing her on the forehead. "You don't share me. You own me.
— Gayle Forman, Where She Went
Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time, it can purify with your love, and falsity and need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection can grow again.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Haven't I? - he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years? ...He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her ...Since the first time I saw you ...Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if ...Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed ...You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved - as if you were a man? ...Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life - the only person I respected - the best business man I know - my ally - my partner in a desperate battle ...The lowest of all desires - as my answer to the highest I've met ...Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ...I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ...Since then ...For two years ...With not a moments respite ...Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ...When I lay awake at night ...When I hear your voice over a telephone wire ...When I worked, but could not drive it away? ...To bring you down to things you cant conceive - and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength - then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation ...I want you - and may I be damned for it!
— Ayn Rand
You’re in my every breath and every thought, intertwined so deep inside me that love’s not a strong enough word—you have my devotion, your name branded on my soul, my wolf yours to command. A hundred years? It’ll never be enough. I want eternity.
— Nalini Singh, Kiss of Snow
The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up.
— Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up
and when love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself. we ask for no mercy or no miracles; we are strong enough to live and to die and to kill flies, attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can't sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles; and don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love failsand death is useless.
— Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Her heart had grown so familiar to the pain of life without him, that to respond now seemed too large a pleasure she could not endure. If pain was love, then she loved fiercely. Yet knew she could not be near that boy again.
— Coco J. Ginger
She held up her calloused, grimy fingers. Leo couldn't help thinking there was nothing hotter than a girl who didn't mind getting her hands dirty. But of course, that was just a general comment. Didn't apply to Calypso. Obviously.
— Rick Riordan, The House of Hades
Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
When you need to be loved, you take love wherever you can find it. When you are desperate to be loved, feel love, know love, you seek out what you think love should look like. When you find love, or what you think love is, you will lie, kill, and steal to keep it. But learning about real love comes from within. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken away. It grows from your ability to re-create within yourself, the essence of loving experiences you have had in your life.
— Iyanla Vanzant
Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Not enough," he said, letting her hair slip through his fingers. "If I kiss you all day, everyday, for the rest of my life, it won't be enough.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Lost Souls
The worst thing you can do if you miss or need someone is let them know it.
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
They say: 'If a man knew himself,he would know all mankind.'I say: 'If a man loved mankind,he would know something of himself.
— Kahlil Gibran, Love Letters in the Sand: The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran
So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o' the wisp. Not long ago you burned--your heart burned--in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all.""Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own? I have given my heart to another.""The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?""Yes.""You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.""Nonetheless, he has my heart. I hope your sisters will not be too hard on you, when you return to them without it.
— Neil Gaiman, Stardust
Just for future reference, don't use words like "love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it's a currency that's easily devalued. Pretty soon you're saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it's an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don't hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means--more. More, more--give me something more. A couple of years from now, when you're on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that--and I pity you if it does--you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs and you have to be willing to drown in it, Kevin. You'd have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that's what real love feels like--choking. They used to bury some women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave. That's why the second most abused word is "forever".
— Peter Craig, Hot Plastic
Touchstone watched, suddenly conscious that he probably only had five seconds left to be alone with Sabriel, to say something, to say anything. Perhaps the last five seconds they ever would have alone together.I am not afraid, he said to himself."I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind.
— Garth Nix, Sabriel
There are some experiences in life they haven't invented the right words for.
— Lisa Kleypas, Married By Morning
I think Heaven will be like a first kiss.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen
Her desires are mine. Her wishes are mine. Should even the world stand against her, my blade will be at her side. And should it fail to protect her, let my own existence be forfeit." - Ash
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron Queen
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
— Nat King Cole
You know that I could as soon forget you as my existence!
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Love comes with a knife, not some shy question, and not with fears for its reputation!
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love
— Erich Fromm
I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.
— Dylan Thomas
In this whole screwed-up town, you're the only thing that's always been right to me," he whispered. "I love you, Claire." She saw something that might have been just a flash of panic go across his expression, but then he steadied again. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I do. I love you.
— Rachel Caine, Lord of Misrule
The moment our lips met, I knew with pure and piercing certainty that I would have waited for him forever.
— Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone
Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.
— David Nicholls, One Day
You can’t leave yet. I’m not finished falling in love with you.
— Colleen Hoover, November 9
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
— Alain de Botton
If we’re going to kiss, it has to be book-worthy.
— Colleen Hoover, November 9
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
— William Faulkner
There has to be a moment at the beginning where you wonder whether you’re in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. If the moment doesn’t pass, that’s it—you’re done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it’s even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lovers’ face.
— David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary
Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch or you might simply get covered in sap and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors where it is harder to get a splinter.
— Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril
One word more. You look as if you thought it tainted you to beloved by me. You cannot avoid it. Nay, I, if I would, cannotcleanse you from it. But I would not, if I could. I have neverloved any woman before: my life has been too busy, my thoughtstoo much absorbed with other things. Now I love, and will love.But do not be afraid of too much expression on my part.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
I regret..." Tobias tilts his head, and sighs. "I regret my choice.""What Choice?", and... I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision."
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
You've got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn't define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don't have to struggle to be good enough for.
— Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming
I let myself slip away... Just to stay sane. Just to get through it. And when I felt myself slipping too far, I held on to the one thing I'm always sure of - Blue eyes. Bronze curls. The fact that Simon Snow is the most powerful magician alive. That nothing can hurt him, not even me. That Simon Snow is alive. And I'm hopelessly in love with him.
— Rainbow Rowell, Carry On
Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue. 
— Osho
Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Before I go," he said, and paused -- "I may kiss her?"It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, "A life you love.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Friendship is selfless love, care, respect, and honor not a profitable opportunity.
— Santosh Kalwar
Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
— Lauren Oliver, Requiem
Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.
— Françoise Sagan
She put one hand on mine. “When someone is in your heart, they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
You had to be willing to fight in order for a love story to last a life time.
— Cristina Marrero, The Unsung Love Story
I knew, you would do me good, in some way, at some time;- I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not- (again he stopped)- did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. 
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.
— Claudia Adrienne Grandi
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character - perfect concord is the result.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
People who love themselves, don’t hurt other people. The more we hate ourselves, the more we want others to suffer.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own.
— H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Love! Love until the night collapses!
— Pablo Neruda, Machu Picchu
If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.
— Michael  Jackson
Look at me, chica." When she does, I repeat, "Eres hermosa.""What does it mean?""You're beautiful.
— Simone Elkeles, Rules of Attraction
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
— Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
I didn't know love could leave the lights on all the time.
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
twice I have lived forever in a smile
— E.E. Cummings
alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul,and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds.flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.there's no chance at all:we are all trapped by a singular fate.nobody ever finds the one.the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the mad houses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.
— Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
Your truest friends are the ones who will stand by you in your darkest moments--because they're willing to brave the shadows with you--and in your greatest moments--because they're not afraid to let you shine.
— Nicole Yatsonsky
Everyone's a little crazy. Some people just hide it better than others.
— Michelle Hodkin, The Retribution of Mara Dyer
You, of all people, deserve a happy ending. Despite everything that happened to you, you aren't bitter. You aren't cold. You've just retreated a little and been shy, and that's okay. If I were a fairy godmother, I would give you your heart's desire in an istant. And I would wipe away your tears and tell you not to cry.-Rachel to Julia
— Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno
Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
He looks at her and smiles. "You're sort of dangerous, you know?" She stares at him. "Me?" "Yeah," he says sitting back. "I'm way too honest with you.
— Jennifer E. Smith, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight
When I asked my da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time came, I'd have no doubt. And I didn't. When I woke in the dark under that tree on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to death, I said to myself 'Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks like, and for all she weights as much as a good draft horse, this is the woman.
— Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
Like ThisIf anyone asks youhow the perfect satisfactionof all our sexual wantingwill look, lift your faceand say,Like this.When someone mentions the gracefulnessof the nightsky, climb up on the roofand dance and say,Like this.If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,or what "God’s fragrance" means,lean your head toward him or her.Keep your face there close.Like this.When someone quotes the old poetic imageabout clouds gradually uncovering the moon,slowly loosen knot by knot the stringsof your robe.Like this.If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,don’t try to explain the miracle.Kiss me on the lips.Like this. Like this.When someone asks what it meansto "die for love," pointhere.If someone asks how tall I am, frownand measure with your fingers the spacebetween the creases on your forehead.This tall.The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.When someone doesn’t believe that,walk back into my house.Like this.When lovers moan,they’re telling our story.Like this.I am a sky where spirits live.Stare into this deepening blue,while the breeze says a secret.Like this.When someone asks what there is to do,light the candle in his hand.Like this.How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?Huuuuu.How did Jacob’s sight return?Huuuu.A little wind cleans the eyes.Like this.When Shams comes back from Tabriz,he’ll put just his head around the edgeof the door to surprise us Like this.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.
— Robert A. Heinlein
I...I sang," she whispered, "if that matters," and Karou felt her heart pulled to pieces. This Misbegotten warrior, fiercest of them all, had crouched in an icy stream bed to sing a chimera soul into her canteen, because she hadn't known what else to do.The singing wouldn't have mattered, but she wasn't going to tell Liraz that. If Ziri's soul was in that canteen, Karou would happily learn whatever song Liraz had sung and make it part of her resurrection ritual forever, just so that the angel would never feel that she'd been foolish.
— Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters
So for now,I will miss you like I’ll never see you again,And the next time I see you,I will kiss you like I’ll never kiss you again,And when I fall asleep beside you I will fall asleep as if I’ll never wake up again,because I don’t know if I will.I don’t know if I will.- I Will Love You Like The World Is Ending
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
That kind of love should've been able to beat sickness. That kind of love should've conquered anything.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
If I never see you again I will always carry youinsideoutsideon my fingertipsand at brain edgesand in centerscentersof what I am ofwhat remains.
— Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
When you leave,weary of me,without a word I shall gently let you go.
— Kim Sowol
Love is eternal -- the aspect may change, but not the essence. There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work.
— Vincent van Gogh
It's easy to look back and see it, and it's easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.
— Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.
— Saul Bellow
How many loved your moments of glad grace,  And loved your beauty with love false or true;  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
— W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn't stop for your grief.
— Faraaz Kazi
I am as wrapped up in her as a vine that clings to a tree seeking for sustenance. She’s tied me to her for eternity. She’s my home. She’s my reason for being. To win and hold her heart is my only purpose.
— Colleen Houck
She asked if I loved another woman, so I answered honestly and said, “Dinner was great, but I could go for dessert.
— Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
I can do pain. That’s the easy part of life. It’s everything else, happiness, laughter, love, that’s fucking complicated.
— Jessica Sorensen, The Coincidence of Callie & Kayden
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.
— Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. ...Scarlett, always save something to fear— even as you save something to love...
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Knees suddenly weak, she reached for his forearms to stabilize herself. “You came for me.”He beamed, looking for all the world like a selfless, daring hero.“Don’t sound so surprised.” Dropping the cane, he pulled her into a crushing embrace that tore her away from Wolf and lifted her clean off the floor. “It turns out you are worth a lot of money on the black market.
— Marissa Meyer, Cress
That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.
— Ursula Hegi
He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
All I want from you is to trust me with what little you can, and grow in loving people around you with the same love I share with you. It's not your job to change them, or to convince them. You are free to love without an agenda.
— William Paul Young, The Shack
Well, you can think what you want, so long as you remember - no matter how ordinary things seem between us - I'm still here, still in love with you, and care about you more than any other guy, evil or otherwise, ever will.
— Richelle Mead, The Indigo Spell
The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person--without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.
— Osho
When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you.
— Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
I love you more. I love you enough to let you go and live your dream." I tilted my head and shrugged. "Don't you see....? I love you more."He smiled softly and I brushed some hair off his forehead. Running the backs of my fingers down his cheek, I whispered, "And, yes, I will miss you, more than you could possibly imagine, but I know that you have to do this Kellan. And you know it too."Stubbornly he shook his head. "No, I know that I have to be with you. Everything else is just .... details.
— S.C. Stephens, Effortless
I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.
— Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight.
— Lana Del Rey
Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings.
— Asa Don Brown
When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
— Anna Louise Strong
You don't know when you're twenty-three.You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten - in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.She didn't know at twenty-three.
— Rainbow Rowell, Landline
Everything I know, I know because of love.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.
— Deb Caletti, The Queen of Everything
No matter how long or how difficult, we will undo whatever that Moroi boy has done to you." to me.
— Richelle Mead, The Fiery Heart
Whoever said that love hurts was wrong. Love is excruciating, especially when you can feel it slipping through your fingers and there is nothing you can do about it. Like someone was playing tug-of-war with my limbs, ripping to shreds whatever was left behind. What it would feel like when love was lost...I wouldn't survive that
— Julie Hockley, Crow's Row
The question, love, is whether you want me enough to take the risk.
— Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight
I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"
Every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later he always acted like I had the plague. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Lucky One
But you cant shut everyone out. I mean you have to have someone to love. . .someone to hold on to. . . someone--
— Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
My love is meatloaf flavored. I just wish my meatloaf was also meatloaf flavored.
— Dora J. Arod, Love quotes for the ages. And the ageless sages.
If I could bronze my love, it’d be worthy of a silver medal. 
— Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
Do not allow me to forget you
— Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons
It's so much easier to convince yourself you're madly in love with someone when you know nothing about him.
— Megan McCafferty, Second Helpings
But I miss screamin' and fightin' and kissin' in the rain and it's 2 a.m. and I'm cursin' your name. You're so in love the you act insane, and that's the way I loved you.
— Taylor Swift
Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.
— Jess C. Scott, EyeLeash: A Blog Novel
I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you.
— Jenny Downham, Before I Die
It should be a privilege to be able to say "I love you" to someone. It shouldn't be something people say just because they feel like it. A privilege that is earned. They say you have to earn the right to be loved; no, love is unconditional, if you love someone, they don't have to earn it. But. The right to tell someone that you love them? That has to be earned. You have to earn the right to be believed.
— C. JoyBell C.
I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)
— Eve Ensler, I am an Emotional Creature
They are orphans again, with no true home but each other and whatever life they can make together on the other side of the sea.
— Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone
If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.
— Richard Siken, Crush
Love is one of the true mysteries,' he said at last. 'The truest and the deepest of all. One thing, Maerad: to love is never wrong. It may be disastrous; it may never be possible; it may be the deepest agony. But it is never wrong.
— Alison Croggon, The Riddle
What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contain such enormity? I suddenly realize why people believe in déjà vu, why people believe they've lived past lives, because there is no way the years I've spent on this earth could possibly encapsulate what I'm feeling. The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations—all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In you heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are now just arriving at the place you were always meant to be.
— David Levithan, Every Day
Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.
— Anthony de Mello, Awareness: Conversations with the Masters
If I were rain, That joins sky and earth that otherwise never touch,Could I join two hearts as well?
— Tite Kubo, Bleach, Volume 01
Wait. This was the first lesson I had learned about love. The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways -- and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don't know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Happiness is part of who we are. Joy is the feeling
— Tony DeLiso, Legacy: The Power Within
We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.
— Karl Lagerfeld
For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? It's no more serious and more important than the numbers that fat red gentleman is adding up? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he'd doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Nobody in my life has ever known me the way you do. Nobody in my life has ever made me feel as good as you do. You know me, you know everything about me, and when you leave me, you're going to be leaving the real me, the me nobody else has ever seen, that's who you're going to be rejecting.
— Jennifer Crusie, Bet Me
Everything that happens to you matters to me.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels
Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.
— Henry Van Dyke
The best love in the world, is the love of a man. The love of a man who came from your womb, the love of your son! I don't have a daughter, but maybe the love of a daughter is the best, too. I am first and foremost me, but right after that, I am a mother. The best thing that I can ever be, is me. But the best gift that I will ever have, is being a mother.
— C. JoyBell C.
Gamble everything for love, if you're a true human being.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray