Quotes About Love

To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth.

And, long after the amorous relation is allayed, I keep the habit of hallucinating the being I have loved: sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.

I myself cannot construct my love story to the end. I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

I counter whatever 'doesn't work' in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile. This stubbornness is love's protest: for all the wealth of 'good reasons' for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the intractable lover

I invoke the other's protection, the other's return: let the other appear, take me away, like a mother who comes looking for her child, from this worldly brilliance, from this social infatuation, let the other restore to me the religious intimacy, the gravity of the lover's world. (X once told me that love had protected him against worldliness: coteries, ambitions, advancements, interferences, alliances, secessions, roles, powers: love had made him into a social catastrophe, to his delight.)

Since I've been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was everything for me, and I've completely forgotten that I'd written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers.

Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life--or love. How to love?

Socrates's daimon (the one who spoke first within him ) whispered to him: no. My daimon, on the contrary, is my stupidity: like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything, in the field of my love.

Is love then, that madness I *want*?

The lover's discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being.

If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents... I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.

A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want?

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist, I know, I know, but all the same...

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing. — Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments . (Hill and Wang; Second Printing edition June 1, 1979) Originally published 1977.

Ce que cache mon langage, mon corps le dit» Roland Barthes (Fragments d'un discours amoureux)

Dreamed of maman again. She was telling me—O cruelty!—that I didn't really love her. But I took it calmly, because I was so sure it wasn't true. The idea that death would be a kind of sleep. But it would be horrible if we had to dream eternally. (And this morning, her birthday. I always gave her a rose. Bought two at the little market of Mers Sultan and put them on my desk)

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense is: a pure portion of anxiety.

the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking

The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death : for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.

Am I in love? -Yes, since I'm waiting. The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wail; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual. even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

The crisis of engulfment can come from a wound but also from a fusion: we die together from loving each other: an open death, by dilution into the ether, a closed death of the shared grave.

Un mandarín estaba enamorado de una cortesana. «Seré tuya», dijo ella, «cuando hayas pasado cien noches esperándome sentado sobre un banco, en mi jardín, bajo mi ventana». Pero, en la nonagesimonovena noche, el mandarín se levanta, toma su banco bajo el brazo y se va.

the first thing we love is a *scene*. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness...what is immediate stands for what is fulfilled: I am initiated: the scene *consecrates* the thing I am going to love