Quotes About Love

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.

Love imposes obligations and these are constant. An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage.

I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you.

We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care. Life had not been too harsh; the sea would still be there at the end. She was nearly ready.

As my love for her grew more poignant and more threatened my impatience and my weariness grew.

Women, after pursuit on his part, had found him disappointing in a way he had never fully understood. His appearance, he supposed, was misleading: he was tall, and to all intents and purposes agreeable to look at, but his longing — for home, for love, for consolation — let him down.

My mistake was to lie in his arms moist-eyed with tenderness and gratitude, when the correct stance would have been a certain detachment, an irony, as if to imply that he would have to love me to a much higher standard to convince me that I had to take him seriously. I should have found such a tactic odious, but now I see that it is sometimes necessary to meet withdrawal with withdrawal, dismissal with dismissal.

Edith laid down her pen. It was all very well to write up Mrs Pusey and Jennifer, but she was still left with that memory of the two women lovingly entwined as they saw her to the door to say goodnight. For there was love there, love between mother and daughter, and physical contact, and collusion about being pretty, none of which she herself had ever known.

Owen had come along and I had fallen in love with him. I had not known then that it is not necessary to marry every man one loves. I know it now. Now I realize that it is marriage which is the great temptation for a woman, and that one can, and perhaps should, resist

I simply want to live with someone so that I can begin my life.

I have no lovers, if that is what you mean. I had them once, but that was when I was free.' 'One is never free. One has only the illusion of freedom. One is never free of obligations, whether explicit or implicit. The latter are the worst.

All the deaths were natural, yet all had an aura of horror. It was their lives rather than their deaths that were regrettable, and all the frustrated love that had failed to sweeten their end.

For that is how he saw me, she thought, and out of love for him that is how I tried to be.

That instant proved to me that it was not the first, almost unemotional, sighting of a potential lover that was significant, but the second, the moment not of recognition but of confirmation, so that every other consideration is irrelevant, as if it might have mattered at some point in the past but no longer had any currency in the charged wordless exchange that seals the matter for ever, regardless of the dangers thus incurred and whatever the cost.

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists

And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.

She wished he were here. In such a short time he had become all-important to her. Thoughts of him filled her waking hours, and her sleep was dotted with dreams of him.

They never looked at anyone else, only at each other, with an expression that halted me. It was tender, loving, yes, but in an inhuman way, so intense. Divine, I felt. Or insane.

Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally.

Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. You have dedicated your life to others -- to your sick brother and your aged aunt and your little brother who will be dependent on you all his life. You have sacrificed your own life for them.

My husband, Jim, converted to Judaism just before our wedding.

The most important thing for a good marriage is to learn how to argue peaceably.