• "I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ."

-Anaïs Nin

• "To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth will be a constellation of musical scores."

-Joaquim Maria

• "But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me."

-Pablo Neruda

• "Looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over—as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs."

-Gregory Maguire

• "With you, I’m useless with words. As if somehow I had to learn to speak all over again, as if the words I needed haven’t been invented yet."

-Unknown

• "My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it’s the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autum, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke—like the end and the beginning of something all at once."

-Lauren Oliver

• "Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?"

-Jonathan Safran Foer

• "Some people meet the way the sky meets the earth— inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense."

-Louise Erdrich

• "I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?"

-Carson McCullers

• "I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture."

-Tom Stoppard

• "Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves; we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle would be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn’t find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted."

-Laura Esquivel

• "Because, I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, —you’d forget me."

-Charlotte Brontë

• "Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life."

-Sylvia Plath