Quotes About Love

The woman who picked us up when we fell down or wiped our faces or fed us lunch or yelled us down from treetops or out of mud (all of it so casually, with barely a break in the conversation or an extra breath) may have been our mother but could just as easily have been someone else's. We hardly noticed. The women merged into a kind of laughing, chatting, benevolent blur, a network of distracted love and safekeeping.

I tried to tell him all the things I hadn't told him before. How it was both our faults, how I'd taken over with the kids and not let the two of us be in that together. Mostly, I wanted him to understand the real reason I'd thought our marriage was over. It was over because we forgot to stay in love. Both of us.

as far as I can tell, no matter what the circumstances, parenthood is thrust upon a parent. No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you've got, say "Oh, my gosh," and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It's not a question of choice.

What she came to was that even if someone wasn't perfect or even especially good, you couldn't dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness.

I'd figured out that a real life didn't mean attaining my heart's desire, but knowing it, meant not in the satisfaction, but the longing. Knowing what you love and why, I found out, is as real as it gets.

Such meanness served up in the sweetest tones, and to someone whose need for love was terrible in its completeness.

You must promise to give yourself entirely to someone or something because that's who you are. You are a genius at devoting yourself; it's what makes you happiest.

She could imagine sustaining certain emotions at that pitch for that long—love absolutely, grief probably, guilt maybe—but hatred was exhausting and gave so little back.

and feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love. In

She believes her parents do not love her less, only that before, she had a child's notion of love that did not include the small treacheries of delusion and fear and shame.

kiss is as frictionless as a bug's wing.

Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?

Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times...

how monstrous the people you loved could be.

deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It's something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

I think because I became a mom later in life, everything in life means more.

what is it like to have a dad?

Love meant knowing you could be broken into pieces again, at any time.

When You Are Old' by W. B. Yeats, which appeared in 1892.

the vast edifice of expectation and commitment that a marriage would pile on her.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face—' Her hand touched his, stopping him.

The heart always finds a way.

She'd found that she needed closeness and trust more than sex. Desire grew out of trust, not the other way round.

It's perfectly possible to love Paris while detesting the French,