logo

Quotes About Love

Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, I love her. Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Who are you, anyway? Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them. I could have sworn we just met, Madeleine said. And that you don't know anything about me. Henry stood up. With a slightly offended air but undiminished confidence, he said, People save themselves. He left her with that to think about.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them...People don't save other people. People save themselves.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
She used a line from Trollope's Barchester Towers as an epigraph:There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Aphrodite put off her famous belt, in which all the charms of love are woven, potency, desire, lovely whispers, and the force of seduction, which takes away foresight and judgment even from the most reasonable people.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full posession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims-- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
It is perhaps in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Leonard's being up early constituted a new change in his sleeping patterns, was part of the former change in his sleeping patterns, or indicated a beneficial development. She didn't know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents?
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt. It was almost worth it. This dependency was what Leonard had guarded himself against feeling all his life, but he couldn't do it anymore. He'd lost the ability to be an asshole. Now he was smitten, and it felt both tremendous and scary.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides