Quotes About Love

We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.

When he pulled her out to feed her or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint . . . Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him.

In the end I was the clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

Sometimes I wonder if she knows, I wonder in my Nothingest moments if she's testing me, if she types nonsense all day long, or types nothing at all, just to see what I'll do in response, she wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words I love you so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said I love you without his ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like Reading in bed, and Giving a bath, and Running while holding the seat of a bicycle. Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn't them. It's cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.

I felt it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love.

Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.

It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me.

All that mattered was him looking at me

She would say to him, "But you are no priest." And he would say, "I am today." And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love.

She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.

He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone else loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one else loves your, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. He knew that it is, by love's definition, impossible to love two people.

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.