Love Affairs Quotes

A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind. ~ Tana French

Though she was intrigued by someone like Claude, the love affairs of a real lesbian like Petit were a matter of complete indifference to Mickey. It seemed to me that our indifference, the indifference of the 'normal' world, made the life of such women even more tragic. For they suffered from their loves, like any other woman, but without the balm of sympathy and understanding. ~ Tereska Torres

If you tell them, I will pay a social visit to your mother." "That's playing dirty," Merrich said. "Perhaps, but you keep your patty-paws out of my love affairs." "Got it. I'll leave the Trieux Troll alone." "Her name is Cinderella." "Could you have said that and sounded anymore lovesick?" "Shut up. Let's go eat." "After you, lover-boy." "I hope she slaps you in the face when she meets you," Friedrich grumbled. "More ~ K.M. Shea

She dreamed of deep soul connections and passionate kisses and daring escapades. She was certain that he simply had to meet her, just once, and he would feel the same way. It would be like those epic love affairs that exploded into existence and burned white hot for all eternity. The type of love that time and distance and even death couldn't separate. ~ Marissa Meyer

This is not my first road trip and it's not my first marriage either. I know that my hissy fit in Fougeres and our bad luck on the road to Bordeaux does not spell doom for either our love affair or our journey. Love affairs are like road trips, and road trips are like love affairs -- from beginning to end the emotions are equally intense, the phases just as predictable. Love and travel. They both have their ups and downs. ~ Vivian Swift

Reaching inside his coat, Christopher pulled out the letter from Pru, the one he carried with him always. It had become a talisman, a symbol of what he had fought for. A reason for living. He looked down at the bit of folded paper, not even needing to open it. The words had been seared into his heart.
"Please come home and find me…"
In the past he had wondered if he were incapable of love. None of his love affairs had ever lasted more than a matter of months, and although they had blazed on a physical level, they had never transcended that. Ultimately no particular woman had ever seemed all that different from the rest.
Until those letters. The sentences had looped around him with a spirit so artless and adorable, he had loved it, loved her, immediately.
His thumb moved over the parchment as if it were sensitive living skin. "Mark my words, Audrey--I'm going to marry the woman who wrote this letter."
"I am marking your words," she assured him. "We'll see if you live up to them. ~ Lisa Kleypas

It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

People keep telling us about their love affairs, when what we really want to know is how much money they make and how they manage on it. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

Few friendships could survive the moodiness of love affairs. ~ Mason Cooley

All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it's all just to lure an ending into your bed. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Thomas was greatly interested in Sirius's accounts of his love affairs; about which, by the way, he showed no reticence. To the question, 'What is it that attracts you in her?' young Sirius could only reply, 'She smells so lovely.' Later in life he was able to say more. Some years later I myself discussed the matter with him, and he said, 'Of course it's mostly the luscious smell of her. I can't possibly make you understand the power of it, because you humans are so bad at smells. It's as though your noses were not merely feeble but colour-blind. But think of all that your poets have ever said about the delectable curves and colours of the beloved, and how her appearance seems to express a lovely spirit (often deceptively), and then imagine the whole thing done in terms of fragrance. Morwen's fragrance when she wants me is like the scent of the morning, with a maddening tang in it for which there are no words. It is the scent of a very gentle and fragrant spirit, but unfortunately the spirit of Morwen is nine-tenths asleep, and always will be. But she smells like what she would be if she were really awake. ~ Olaf Stapledon

The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control. ~ William Safire

Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. ~ Adelle Waldman

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity. ~ Stendhal

People should not judge failed love affairs as failed experiences, but as part of the growth process. Something does not have to end well for it to have been one of the most valuable experiences of a lifetime. ~ Ethel Person

The best love affairs are those we never had. ~ Norman Lindsay

Our young people think about nothing more than love affairs and pleasure. They spend more time attempting to seduce and dishonor young women than in thinking about their country's welfare. Our women, in order to take care of the house and family of God, forget their own. Our men limit their activities to vice and their heroics to shameful acts. Children wake up in a fog of routine, adolescents live out their best years without ideals, and their elders are sterile, and only serve to corrupt our young people by their example. ~ Jose Rizal

I've never lost my cool. Even in love affairs. If you have Plan B and Plan C, you are all the time relaxed. ~ Mikhail Prokhorov

They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening - always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day; they began to talk of marrying in July - in June. All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified - their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love-affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It would be like those epic love affairs that exploded into existence and burned white hot for all eternity. The type of love that time and distance and death couldn't seperate ~ Marissa Meyer

There in bed, happiness comes over me. Not like something that belongs to me, but like a wheel of fire rolling through the room and the world. For a moment I think I'll manage to let it pass and be able to lie there, aware of what I have, and not wish for anything more. The next moment I want to hang on. I want it to continue. He has to lie beside me tomorrow, too. This is my chance. My only, my last chance. I swing my legs onto the floor. Now I'm panic-stricken. This is what I've been working to avoid for thirty-seven years. I've systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning. How to renounce. I've stopped hoping for anything. When experienced humility becomes an Olympic discipline, I'll be on the national team. I've never had any patience for other people's unhappy love affairs. I hate their weakness. ~ Peter Hoeg

You will see the world. You will have love affairs with boys who see past a pretty face. You will be strong. You will call and tell me about it. ~ Laura Ruby

I am no Christian. These days it does no good to confess that, for the bishops and abbots have too much influence and it is easier to pretend to a faith than to fight angry ideas. I was raised a Christian, but at ten years old, when I was taken into Ragnar's family, I discovered the old Saxon gods who were also the gods of the Danes and of the Norsemen, and their worship has always made more sense to me than bowing down to a god who belongs to a country so far away that I have met no one who has ever been there. Thor and Odin walked our hills, slept in our valleys, loved our women and drank from our streams, and that makes them seem like neighbours. The other thing I like about our gods is that they are not obsessed with us. They have their own squabbles and love affairs and seem to ignore us much of the time, but the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws. He strikes me as a very grumpy god, that one, even though his priests are forever claiming that he loves us. I have never been so stupid as to think that Thor or Odin or Hoder loved me, though I hope at times they have thought me worthy of them. ~ Bernard Cornwell

Oh, there's nothing more dangerous in life at getting hurt at than love itself. People are hurt in love affairs and never recover, more than a boxing match. ~ George Foreman

The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...
We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that. ~ Lorrie Moore

The desire to love someone always exceeds the desire to be loved by someone & that's exactly why we end up loving the person who doesn't deserve that LOVE. ~ Anirban Bose

But of course, she remembered, that was why women were so wonderful; it was their love and imagination that transformed these unremarkable beings. For most men, when one came to think of it, were undistinguished to look at, if not positively ugly. Fabian was an exception, and perhaps love affairs with handsome men tended to be less stable because so much less sympathy and imagination were needed on the woman's part? ~ Barbara Pym

They say adolescent 'best' friendships are like love affairs where we learn the rules of relationships: commitment, trust, loyalty, jealousy, exchange, loss. Not being acquainted with the theories of friendship, Charles and Lise chose each other out of good humoured envy. Each wanted the life of the other. ~ Barbara Wels

Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners. ~ Robertson Davies

Anyone familiar with the love affairs between men and women could have told them that theirs would soon be over. ~ Anna Quindlen

Disappointment over love affairs generally has the effect of driving men to drink, and women to ruin; and this, because most people never learn the art of transmuting their strongest emotions into dreams of a constructive nature. ~ Napoleon Hill

How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar! ~ John Wain

What kind of friendship have you had?
Or for that matter ... what kind of love affairs? ~ James Baldwin

A woman claims as many native lands as she had happy love affairs, Likewise, she is born under every sky where she recovers from the pain of loving. ~ Colette

Now that is one real good feeling, to know you've got a good-sized chunk of time with somebody you love. ~ Robert Lee Willie

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology. ~ H.L. Mencken

Lack of reciprocity ruins friendships, but makes love affairs exciting for a time. ~ Mason Cooley

A history of nightlife!
what an interesting concept. A history of a people, told not through their daily travails and successive political upheavals, but via the changes in their nightly celebrations and unwindings. History is, in this telling, accompanied by a bottle of Malbec, some fine Argentine steak, tango music, dancing, and gossip. It unfolds through and alongside illicit activities that take place in the multitude of discos, dance parlors, and clubs. Its direction, the way people live, is determined on half-lit streets, in bars, and in smoky late-night restaurants. This history is inscribed in songs, on menus, via half-remembered conversations, love affairs, drunken fights, and years of drug abuse. ~ David Byrne

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end. ~ Pico Iyer

The clouds won't shatter my dreams, but this is a story about how I lost myself to the storm."
"And something's got me tethered to you ... "
"Always to you ... "
"They think I'm crazy ... I love him. I swear, I do."
"Then why are you here, T?"
"Esto es complicado, Eli. It's all the lies I made up to get away from you, the distance I drove to free myself, that's brought me here. It's that moment before your kiss and the sound of my name on your lips. It's you that's taken me the five miles I needed to be where you are. I won't run again."
"What are we doing?"
"We're LIVING. ~ Nadege Richards

Yet for some reason, we as a society have
collectively decided it's better to have millions of human beings spending years of
their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends' complex polyamorous love affairs. ~ David Graeber

It's funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that's why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It's not the pain they're getting over, it's the love. ~ Melina Marchetta

There are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-panelled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffee-houses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close-up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter's girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river. * ~ Amos Oz

They may not know each other to say it, but it was never hidden. How much ever they hated each other, fate ties them together. ~ Parul Wadhwa

Good content is the stuff of love affairs. ~ Tom Webster

The armed forces knew he was a homosexual, that he was certain to fall in love with other fighting men, and the armed forces didn't want to put up with such love affairs. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land - all things born of the soul that can only be felt. ~ Anthony De Sa

I loved you for a thousand years and missed you in all of them. ~ Christina Strigas

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies. The simplest human action varies from one person and occasion to the next-how else would we recognize our friends only from their gait, posture, voice, and divine their changing moods? Only a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds. This is a blessing, not a drawback. A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Perhaps all early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house under the artu tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across the sea and across the reef. She lit the lagoon to it's dark, dim heart. She lit the coral brains and sand spaces, and the fish casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The keeper of the lagoon rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her reflection on the mirror-like surface into a thousand glittering ripples. She saw the white staring ribs of the form on the reef. Then, peeping over the trees, she looked down into the valley, where the great stone idol had kept it's solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps, and more.

At this base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings, naked, clasped in each other's arms and fast asleep. One could scarcely pity his vigil, had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless and without sin. A marriage according to Nature, without feasts or guests, consummated with accidental cynicism under the shadow of a religion a thousand years dead. ~ Henry De Vere Stacpoole

Other people's children, like other people's love affairs, were so much less interesting than one's own. ~ Helen McCloy

All women on earth
and men, too for that matter
hope for the kind of love that transforms us, raises us up out of the everyday, & gives us the courage to survive our little deaths: the heartache of unfulfilled dreams, of career and personal disappointments, of broken love affairs. ~ Lisa See

For although she had been, and still was, very much admired, she had got into the way of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs to any others, so that it was becoming almost a bad habit. ~ Barbara Pym

That is why I take the younger ones, you see. You already give parts of your hearts away so easily--little fragments attached to celebrities, to hobbies, to ill-fated love affairs. Your kind have the best chance at survival. ~ Emily Lloyd-Jones

I have certainly had my share of long-distance love affairs. ~ Drew Barrymore

Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice. ~ Philip Reeve

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. ~ David Nicholls

If all the months and all their days could be like June weather in New York, there would be paradise on earth. Often, in early June, momentous decisions are made, power waxes strong, quick wars are fought, and love affairs are begun and ended. ~ Mark Helprin

I was growing stale in London. I was tired of doing much the same thing everyday. My friends pursued their course with uneventfulness; they had no longer any surprises for me, and when I met them I knew pretty well what they would say; even their love-affairs had a tedious banality. We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly. I was seized with panic. I gave up my small apartment, sold my few belongings, and resolved to start afresh. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Most of the famous love affairs of literature or film were quite short. What was 'Romeo & Juliet'? How long were they together? A few days. ~ Jesse Harris

Look, three love affairs in history, are Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this President at the moment. But this doesn't matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he's fine. If it doesn't work, all of the adulation of journalists in the world won't matter. ~ George Will

For the last 30 years, I've been leading a life of crime and international intrigue that's involved 40 stamps in my passport, love affairs, and broken hearts to go with each one of them. You would have to live three lifetimes to catch up with just the allegations that follow me! ~ David Lee Roth

I've always said that movies are kind of like love affairs. Two people come together, and if they're at the right place at the right time and it's the right situation, it clicks. I've always felt that I've connected with screenplays. It's the romantic in me. ~ Robert Zemeckis

To make a current example, the world can find human interest in the death and the love affairs and the pallid addiction to cocaine of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. ~ John Albert Macy

Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs. ~ Diana Athill

'From Here to Eternity' happens to be fourteen-carat entertainment. The main trouble is that it is too entertaining for a film in which love affairs flounder, one sweet guy is beaten to death, and a man of high principles is mistaken for a saboteur and killed on a golf course. ~ Manny Farber

The consequences of love affairs would stop me from my independent freedom of creative activity, and I don't intend to be stopped. ~ Sylvia Plath

Think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it - our life - hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening. ~ Alain De Botton

We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Our love affairs with sin are not just a matter of morality, though, but of joy. This is not just about faithfulness to God, but about finding our deepest, most satisfying fulfillment. Many people think following Jesus means surrendering our happiness. You can either enjoy a fun, passionate, and exciting life here for a short time or live a bland, boring, but safe life forever with God. That lie is a quiet, but violent concentration camp, fencing men and women in, keeping them away from God, and torturing them with lesser pleasures that only lead to a swift and yet never-ending death. If you want to be truly happy - even in this life, surrounded by everything beautiful, fun, and exciting in this world - you want to be found with Jesus. ~ Marshall Segal

It is love that transports us, that fills us with joy! Love turns life into one long adventure, every encounter is a dazzling experience - well, not always, of course, but in actual fact, it is our less successful love affairs that enable us to appreciate the others. I think love protects us from one of the biggest problems facing the modern world: boredom. ~ Francois Lelord

His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife's unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love. ~ Graham Greene

For they can picture love affairs of chemicals and stars... ~ Jim Morrrison

It seemed to me he was well rid of Maureen, if she really was disturbing him to the extent that it appeared; but being judicious about other people's love affairs is easy, often merely a sign one has not understood their force or complexity. ~ Anthony Powell

I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs. ~ Claire Tomalin

I'm afraid that most people cry more tears over their own affairs than over other people's massacres. Like, over broken love affairs. Or even toothache. ~ Kenneth Lillington

So, in spite of all apparent contradictions, this strange love of Hitler for Stefanie falls into the pattern of his character. Love was a field where the unforeseeable might happen, and which might become dangerous. How many men who had set out with great intentions had been forced off their path by irregular and complicated love affairs. It was imperative to be on one's guard!

Instinctively, the young Hitler found the only correct attitude in his love for Stefanie: he possessed a being whom he loved, and at the same time, he did not possess her. He arranged his whole life as though he possessed this beloved creature entirely. But as he himself avoided any personal meeting, this girl, although he could see that she walked the earth, remained nevertheless a creature of his dream world, towards whom he could project his desires, plans and ideas. And thus he kept himself from deviating from his own path; indeed, this strange relationship, through the power of love, increased his own will. He imagines Stefanie as his wife, builds the house in which they live together, surrounds it with a magnificent garden and arranges his home with Stefanie, just as, in fact, he did later on the Ober-Salzburg, though without her. This mixing of dream and reality is characteristic of the young Hitler. And whenever there is a danger that the beloved would entirely escape into the realm of fantasy, he hurries to the Schmiedtoreck and makes sure that she really walks the earth. Hitler was ~ August Kubizek

Striding, finally, into the solitude. You feel as if part of your body has been ripped from you, as if flesh has been torn from flesh. But you feel powerful too, for you're free, after so long; the great burden of uncertainty, and guilt, has gone.

But then the anger comes.

At all the times in the past you've said I love you and felt stripped. All the times they never rang back. All the love affairs that evaporated, bleakly, into one-night stands. All the times they've drowned you out. Drained your energy. Your confidence. Stood you up. Walked out. Wanted a Chinese girl next. ~ Nikki Gemmell

Love affairs that start in blood tend to end up in blood. ~ David Gilmour

[Friendships] are easy to get out of compared to love affairs, but they are not easy to get out of compared to, say, jail. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Love affairs are the real only education in life. ~ Marlene Dietrich

The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The majority of love affairs are temporary. But that doesn't diminish the possibility the next one might become something more. ~ Ally Blake

Intimacy is a word with eight letters. A word with a sly hiss to it. But then it begins, like love affairs do, with a chance meeting, and then a raw empty something needing to be sated, something you didn't notice before…but suddenly it squawks like a hungry bird, day and night, refusing to be ignored. You love and revile it, this sore shrieking something. Or is it nothing? Or everything? It doesn't matter. It's yours. It's you. ~ Catherine Hanrahan

When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity. ~ Joseph Campbell

You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin. ~ Ann Brashares

Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of "taking to the bed."

He says "In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons - ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve…And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I've done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know.

Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by muddledness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual….For from the bed we came and to it we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, a ~ Brian Doyle

You don't have to have lots of love affairs to know what love is. ~ Joshua Bell

Maybe all great love stories earn themselves a thoughtless void at some point in time. ~ Adhish Mazumder

What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has not the faintest notion of this unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she has to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body, both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe--since I love her--that if Lol is silent in daily life, it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter, it would have been made to reverberate. Enormous, endless, an empty gong, it would have held back anyone who wanted to leave, it would have convinced them of the impossible, it would have made them deaf to any other word save that one, in one fell swoop it would have defined the moment and the future themselves. By its absence this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh. How were other words found? Hand-me-downs from God knows how many love affairs like Lol Stein's, affairs nipped in the bud, trampled upon, and from massacres, ~ Marguerite Duras

For repeating themselves from the first kiss to the last sigh, the average man's love affairs have History blushing with envy. ~ Helen Rowland

Love affairs, in their beginnings, are all about the present. But there is a point in each
an event, an exchange, some other unseen trigger
which forces the past and the future back into focus. ~ Kate Morton

To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whisky bottle. To mingle their pain their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience. ~ Jean Stafford

When you look back ... on your love affairs ... what you really find out is that the only person you really go to bed with is yourself. ~ Shirley Maclaine

Now the sun is wide awake, baring its teeth, making the sweat run down people's back. Before it will make its way across the sky and into the waiting arms of the Arabian Sea, so much will have happened: migrations into the city, births, marriages, dowry deaths, illicit love affairs, pay raises, first kisses, bankruptcy filings, traffic accidents, business deals, money changing hands, plant shutdowns, gallery openings, poetry readings, political discussions, evictions. Every event in human history will repeat itself today. Everything that ever happened will happen again today. All if life lived in a day. A day, a day. A silver urn of promise and hope. Another chance. At reinvention, at resurrection, at reincarnation. A day. The least and most of all of our lives. ~ Thrity Umrigar

A cat is a regency gentleman
elegant of pose, exquisite of manner, with spotless linen and an enthusiasm for bare knuckle fights, rampaging love affairs, duels by moonlight and the singing of glees. He expects immaculate service from his domestic staff, and possesses a range of invective that would make a navy blanch. ~ Pam Brown

In all love affairs there is hate revenge hope and pain so why do we humans seek it. ~ Leila Osman