• "I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love."

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

• "Love is not consolation, it is light."

Simone Weil, from “Detachment,” Gravity and Grace

• “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

• "Often when I imagine you/ your wholeness cascades into many shapes./ You run like a herd of luminous deer/ and I am dark, I am forest."

Rainer Maria Rilke, from I, 45

• "It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

• "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers."

Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds

• "I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts."

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

• "That is what I want of you—out of the sight and sound of other people, to lie close to you & let the world rush by. To watch with you suns rising and moons rising in that purple edge outside most people’s vision—to hear high music that only birds can hear—oh, my dearest, dearest, would it not be wonderful, just once to be together again for a little while?"

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a letter to Arthur Davison Ficke

• "Stay longer in me,/ take root."

Vera Pavlova, from If There Is Something To Desire: One Hundred Poems

• "'I love three things,' I then say. 'I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.' 'And which do you love best?' 'The dream.'"

Knut Hamsun

• *"Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?"

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

• "In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm."

Jeanette Winterson, from Written On The Body

• ""Amo: volo ut sis." (I love you: I want you to be.)"

Martin Heidegger, quoting Augustine, in a letter to Hannah Arendt, 1925

• "To sum up life: We’re all just walking each other home."

Ram Dass

• "And I have the feeling that I do get to bring you back through the writing. The memory of you, all of it, comes back. And suddenly you’re there; before me: you just stand there and watch me write and my own words mock me but it no longer matters because I feel you there."

Simone de Beauvoir, from Letters To Sartre

• "This girl who stands so quiet and grave at the mouth of hell. This girl who is all quietness and sanity and innocence. You wondered why I wanted her?"

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

• "You are like night, calmed, constellated./ Your silence is star-like, as distant, as true."

Pablo Neruda

• "… my whole sky craves/ an island of tenderness./ My rivers tilt towards you."

Marina Tsvetaeva, “My ear attends to you,” Selected Poems, (Penguin Classics, 1994)

• "He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair."

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

• "Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted–wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me."

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

• "The sunset in the dream reminds me of home. A home by another name. With lingering moments and faded forevers. I’m aching for the stillness inside of you. For nights under the starless sky that always seemed enough. Remember the sunken paths; remember my lips on yours. Remember when all we needed was the silence."

Michelle Tudor, Every Sunset

• "As it has been said:/ Love and a cough/ cannot be concealed./ Even a small cough./ Even a small love."

Anne Sexton, Small Wire

• "What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you."

Jeanette Winterson

• "I thought/ that pain meant/ I was not loved./ It meant I loved."

Louise Glück, from Ararat

• "When you shrug his body off you, let him stroke your spine,/ try to shudder you back open. Let him reach/ toward your light, call you/ back. Let him try."

Franny Choi, from “How to Win an Argument,” Floating, Brilliant, Gone

• An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us./ It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us./ The possibility of life between us.

Adrienne Rich, from ‘On Lies, Secrets & Silence’

• "Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea."

Jeanette Winterson, from The Passion

• Even though psychoanalysts, from Fromm writing in the fifties to Peck in the present day, critique the idea that we fall in love, we continue to invest in the fantasy of effortless union. We continue to believe we are swept away, caught up in the rapture, that we lack choice and will. In “The Art of Loving,” Fromm repeatedly talks about love as action, “essentially an act of will.” He writes: “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go.” Peck builds upon Fromm’s definition when he describes love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, adding: “The desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will–namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Despite these brilliant insights and the wise counsel they offer, most people remain reluctant to embrace the idea that it is more genuine, more real, to think of choosing to love rather than falling in love. […] We are all capable of shifting our paradigms, the foundational ways of thinking and doing things that become habitual. We are all capable of changing our attitudes about “falling in love.” We can acknowledge the “click” we feel when we meet someone new as just that—a mysterious sense of connection that may or may not have anything to do with love. However, it could or could not be the primal connection while simultaneously acknowledging that it will lead us to love. How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we said “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.” Or, if instead of saying “I am in love,” we said, “I am loving” or “I will love.” Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.

BELL HOOKS, FROM “ROMANCE: SWEET LOVE”

• "The paradox: vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me and the first thing I look for you in you."

Brene Brown

• "I love badly. That is, too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window."

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

• "She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood./ She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."

Neil Gaiman

• Somewhere on the other side of this wide night/ and the distance between us, I am thinking of you."

Carol Ann Duffy, excerpt of Words, Wide Night

• I’m not ashamed/ Love is large and monstrous"

Maggie Nelson, from “Something Bright, Then Holes”

• "Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream."

Euripides (tr. Anne Carson)

• “Come sit down beside me. That’s all you ever have to do.”

Alice Notley, from In the Pines

• "How love is still unrooting you."

Safiya Sinclair, “The Art of Unselfing,” Poetry (December 2015)

• "Sometimes there’s only a hint, a possibility./ What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots/ than reason./ I hope everyone knows that."

Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

• "This is a very unreal sort of summer. Do you ever have periods like that in which reality seems to have entirely withdrawn? It is not necessarily unpleasant…"

Tennessee Williams, from The Selected Letters: 1920-1945

• "I listen always. Give a small sign./ Feel me here."

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke; “The Book of Hours”

• A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

• "Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy./ Love on the part of someone who is unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is happy without sharing in this happiness or even wishing to do so."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

• "It is hell and heaven joined together in the same place, and you can’t inhabit one without inhabiting the other. […] So you must suffer, then, and love, love until death, and even after."

—Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, from Terra Amata

• "You flicker. I cannot touch you./ I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns—"

Sylvia Plath, “Poppies in July”

• "You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart."

Franz Kafka

• "Being in love was like running barefoot along a street covered with broken bottles. It was foolhardy, and if you got through it without damage it was only by sheer luck. It was like taking off your clothes at lunchtime in a bank. It let people think they knew something about you that you didn’t know about them, it gave them power over you. It made you visible, soft, penetrable; it made you ludicrous."

Margaret Atwood, Bodily Harm

• "You are unique./ And love is no detective."

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Bride Of Ice: New Selected Poems

• "Your name is a–bird in my hand/ a piece of ice on my tongue."

“Poems for Blok” by Marina Tsvetaeva

• "There was once a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her-immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love."

Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House

• "You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free."

Thich Nhat Hanh

• "Light is more important than the lantern,/ The poem more important than the notebook,/ And the kiss more important than the lips./ My letters to you/ Are greater and more important than both of us."

Translated by B. Frangieh And C. Brown

• Except for your eyes,/ no blade can control me,/ no sharpened knife."

Vladimir Mayakovsky, ”Lilichka!”

• "Walk with me. Walk the broken past, named and not. Walk the uneasy peace we share.Walk with me, through the night, the night air, the breathing particles of other lives. Too much to carry around the heart. Walk free."

Jeanette Winterson, from “Gut Symmetries,” published c. 1998

• "We travelled down the still river in the evening,/ the acacia stood in the color of rose, casting its light/ The clouds cast down the rose light. But I scarcely saw them,/ All I saw were the plum blossoms in your hair."

Herman Hesse

• "Like a child, I think if you were here, I should be happy."

Virginia Woolf, a letter to Vita Sackville-West

• "The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace."

Jacques Derrida (trans. Alan Bass), The Postcard: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond

• "Is it called love or nerves, you said, when everything is on the verge of happening?"

Rosmarie Waldrop, from Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons, 1993)

• When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. in the beginning the love you get is the love that sets./ I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon. Mrs Winterson’s god was the God of the Old Testament and it may be that modeling yourself on a deity who demands absolute love from his ‘children’ but thinks nothing of drowning them (Noah’s ark), attempting to kill the ones who madden him (Moses), and letting Satan ruin the life of the most blameless of them all (Job), is bad for love./ True, God reforms himself and improves thanks to his relationship with human beings, but Mrs Winterson was not an interactive type; she didn’t like human beings and she never did reform or improve. She was always striking me down, and then making a cake to put things right, and very often after a lockout we’d walk down to the fish and chip shop the next night and sit on the bench outside eating from the newspaper and watching people come and go./ For most of my life I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love. Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care./ Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love."

Jeanette Winterson, from “Why be happy when you could be normal?”