Happy Valentine's Day! Whether you love or hate this holiday, it's a time for reflection on what, whom, and how we love. Instead of a links round-up, I thought I'd pull together some of my favorite reflections on love, from people who can articulate this crazy, hectic, passionate, terrifying, exhilarating, horrible, wonderful (you get the picture...) sentiment far better than I can. They're all literary quotes which tells you a little bit about what's been going on in my brain lately (so. much. reading!)...
"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing's being dull and insipid about the house! I must be in love..." - Jane Austen, Emma
“When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No … don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it is!” - Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." - Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
"My love is deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite." - William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
"Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too." - Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
"When we hear voices that we love, we need not understand the words they say." - Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
"Love should be allowed. I'm all for it." - Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
And Fyodor Dostoyevsky agrees in The Brothers Karamazov...
"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
"Love will carry you all lengths." - Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
(Photo of this month's cover of The New Yorker -- I am obsessed with it!)
(Photo of this month's cover of The New Yorker -- I am obsessed with it!)
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