Quotable | Valentine's Edition

I have a thing for quotes.  I'm terrible at remembering them or using them to make snappy comebacks in conversation, but I love them nonetheless.  I've always been amazed by the power of a word, a phrase, a sentence - how one person's words can transcend time and distance to inspire another person a lifetime, a world away.  Sometimes you feel like nobody else understands precisely what you are feeling, experiencing, enduring and then you find a verse from a poem, a line of lyrics from a song, a snippet of a speech given eons ago, and suddenly you realize that you are not alone.  Someone else in the course of human history went through what you are going through and you feel connected to the world, the past, the present and the future because maybe something you say or write or sing will be passed through the ages and resonate with distant generations. 

So yes, I have a thing for quotes so I thought it would be nice to post a bunch of love-related ones in the spirit of the holiday.  Here it goes...

Relationships

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.
- A. A. Milne, Winne-the-Pooh

A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.
- Elbert Hubbard

I wonder what thou and I did, till we loved.  Were we not weaned till then? 
- John Donne

We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
- Robert Fulghum, True Love 

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. 
- Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice   

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.

- Alfred Tennyson

Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
"After all this time?"
"Always," said Snape.” 
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater...The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that's the key. It's like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot. 
- Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby  

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  

“And so the lion fell in love with the lamb…" he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word.
"What a stupid lamb," I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion.”  
- Stephenie Meyer, Twilight  
 

"So it's not gonna be easy. It's going to be really hard; we're gonna have to work at this everyday, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, everyday. You and me... everyday.” 

- Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.
- Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets 

“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough..”
- Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

 

“You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real.” 

- Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay 

 He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest. 
- W. H. Auden
 

What is Love?

“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”
- Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist 

You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
- Dr. Seuss

⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
- The Bible: New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

You're the one who is weak. You will never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry for you.
- J.K. Rowling

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  

There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.
- Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever 

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones 

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land 
  
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."  Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
- Erich Fromm 

“Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it.”
 - Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember  

Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
- Germaine de Stael 
 

Inspirational

Where there is love there is life.
- Mahatma Gandhi 

³⁴ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵ By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
- The Bible: New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), John 13:34-35

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
- Mother Teresa 
  

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.  
- Lao Tzu
 

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

- Mother Teresa

  

Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

- Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam

“Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve.”
- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower 

 
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
- William Shakespeare

Just The Way You Are

We love the things we love for what they are.  
- Robert Frost

Perhaps it is our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another!
- Jane Austen, Emma  

If you judge people, you have no time to love them. 

- Mother Teresa 

“You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”
 - Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper 
 

Happy Valentine's Day! I hope you can spend it with your loved ones.

Love,

- H