Quotes About Love

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.

I had not yet reached this stage. At one time it was my memory made more clear by some intellectual excitement — such as reading a book — which revived my grief, at other times it was on the contrary my grief — when it was aroused, for instance, by the anguish of a spell of stormy weather — which raised higher, brought nearer to the light, some memory of our love.

That is how I see her to this day: standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea, and separated from me by the transparent sky-blue stretch of time elapsed since that moment, the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very slight image of a face first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again, a face which since then I have often projected into the past, so as to say to myself, of a girl with me in my bedroom, 'That was her!

There can be no peace in mind of love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires.

Regret, like desire, seeks satisfaction and not self-analysis: in the beginning of love, our time is spent not in finding out what love is made of, but in trying to make sure we can see each other tomorrow; and at the end of love, we do not try to ascertain the nature of our sorrow, but only to voice it in what we hope is its tenderest form to her who is the cause of it.

I told my mother, knowing the pain I was causing her, which she did not show, and which betrayed itself in her only by that look of serious concern she wore when she compared the gravity of making me unhappy or of doing me harm, the look she had worn in Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night beside me, that look which at this moment bore an extraordinary resemblance to that of my grandmother when she allowed me to drink cognac,

Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d'Éporcheville's features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible.

Although Albertine existed in my memory only in the states in which she had appeared successively during her life, that is, subdivided into a series of temporal fractions, my thoughts, restoring her unity, reconstituted her as a person, and it is on this person that I wanted to form an overall judgment, to know whether she had lied, whether she had loved women, and whether it was in order to be free to frequent them that she had left me.

My happiness and my life needed Albertine to be virtuous, thus they had posited once for all that she was. Armed with this salutary faith, I could safely allow my mind to play sadly with the suppositions which it formulated without believing in them. I thought, "Perhaps she does love women," as one thinks, "I might die during the night"; we say the words to ourselves, but we do not believe them, we make plans for the morrow.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality.

And Labruyère tells us that that is everything. 'To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.' He is right; that is the only form of happiness

I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.

O modo inquisitivo, ansioso, exigente com que olhamos para a pessoa amada, nossa expectativa da palavra que nos vai dar ou tirar a esperança de um encontro para o dia seguinte, e, até que essa palavra seja dita, a nossa imaginação alternada, se não simultânea, da alegria e do desespero, tudo isso torna a nossa atenção em face do ente querido muito trêmula para que se possa obter uma imagem sua devidamente nítida.

No doubt it is because memories do not remain true for ever, and because life is made up of the endless renewal of cells, that love is not eternal.

My ——" or "My dearest ——" followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be 'My Marcel,' or 'My dearest Marcel.' After this I would never allow my relatives, by calling me 'dearest,' to rob of their priceless uniqueness the delicious words that Albertine uttered to me

As for our sentiments, we have spoken of them too often to repeat again now that as often as not love is nothing more than the association of the face of a girl (whom otherwise we should soon have found intolerable) with the heartbeats inseparable from an endless, vain expectation, and from some trick that she has played upon us. All this is true not merely of imaginative young men brought into contact with changeable girls.

As for our feelings, we need hardly repeat that love is often only the association between the image of a girl (of whom otherwise we would very quickly have tired) and the increased heart rate inseparable from a long, futile wait when the young lady in question has "stood us up.

El deseo nos fuerza a amar lo que nos hará sufrir.

Il invoquait le jour où la sphère divine se gonflerait, après toutes les transformations des âmes. Car le monde que nous connaissons est l'oeuvre de la haine, et sa dissolution sera l'oeuvre de l'amour.

Il regarda sa fille et la trouva vierge et désirable.

And Monelle said again: I pity you, I pity you, my love. Even so, I shall return to the night; for it is necessary that you lose me before you find me again. And if you find me again, I shall elude you once more. For I am she who is alone. And Monelle said again: Because I am alone, you shall give me the name Monelle. But you shall imagine that I have every other name.

I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind - perhaps all at once. But to Pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of reason.

no one tells you this, how having children multiplies your capacity for suffering.