Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
The whole reason I’m having us talk about my record and what I get afraid might happen is that I don’t want it to happen, see? […]I don’t want to get all testy or hypercritical or pull away and not be around for days at a time… Does this make any sense? Can you believe that I’m honestly trying to respect you by warning you about me, in a way? That I’m trying to by honest instead of dishonest? That I’ve decided that the best way to head off this pattern where you get hurt and fell abandoned and I fell like sh!! Is to try to be honest for once. Even if I should have done it sooner?[…]Do you understand that I’m trying as hard as I can to love you? That I’m terrified that I can’t love?
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Who has not loved twice? More than twice? Who has never broken a heart?
Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
You know what the secret is? It’s so simple. We love one another. We’re nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is?
Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
André Breton
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?
George Sand
I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars via scout)

(via scout)

Source: intoxicatedsoul

Sitting there in your pajamas & all the time in the world & if I could keep any moment it would be this: watching you & holding my breath with the wonder of it all.
Brian Andreas
I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you goodnight. And there’s a lot of difference.
Ernest Hemingway (via scout)

(via scout)

I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. Or I would not love you at all.
Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson (via helplesslyamazed)

Source: helplesslyamazed

When you love someone /
and you bite your tongue /
all you get is a mouth full of blood /
Fruit Bats
I don’t know that Paolo’s the love of my life, but I’ve decided to give him the chance to be. Maybe true love is a decision. You know, a decision to take a chance with somebody. To give to somebody. Without worrying whether they’ll give anything back. Or if they’re gonna hurt you, or if they really are the one. Maybe love isn’t something that happens to you. Maybe it’s something you have to choose.
Brittany Murphy, Love and Other Disasters
‘And now I’m looking at you,’ he said, ‘and you’re asking me if I still want you, as if I could stop loving you. As if I would want to give up the thing that makes me stronger than anything else ever has. I never dared give much of myself to anyone before, but since the first time I saw you, I have belonged to you completely.’
Cassandra Clare (via quotewhore)

Source: quotewhore

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else’s body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn’t there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient’s body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: ‘Do you want your belly pressed against this person’s belly forever —or not?’
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia