I couldn’t love anyone more than I do you, it would kill me. And I couldn’t love anyone less because it would always feel like less. Even if I loved some other girl, that’s all I would ever think about, the difference between loving her and loving you.
—Rainbow Rowell in Attachments
All the time I think I can never love you more than I already do. And then you do something or say something, and I love you more than ever. Like just now. Like now. How is it possible? Can you love someone more and more and at the same time, all the time, love them as much as it’s possible to love someone?
—Aidan Chambers in This is All
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
—Tom Robbins
Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay. Leaving this man you’ve been with for six years won’t be easy, but you’ll be okay and so will he. The end of your relationship with him will likely also mark the end of an era of your life. In moving into this next era there are going to be things you lose and things you gain. Trust yourself.
—Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things
A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.
—Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love
When people care about each other, they always find a way to make it work.
—Nicholas Sparks in True Believer
More than kisses, letters mingle souls.
—John Donne
Romantic love, I think, requires a degree of physical attraction, but devotion is needed to maintain it as an actual relationship. Physical attraction is a feeling you don’t really have control over, but devotion is something that has to be chosen.
—Angela N. Blount in Once Upon A Road Trip
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.
—Tom Robbins
Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.
—Lillian Gordy Carter
Sometimes I would open my eyes when we were kissing, I would watch him and I could see it. I could actually see love—not words, not an emotion, not an abstract concept or a subjective state of mind, but a living, breathing thing.
—Tiffanie DeBartolo in How to Kill a Rock Star
God I loved that man. Love flooded every cell in my body and I felt physically ill at the thought of never seeing him again.
—Courtney Cole in Every Last Kiss
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
—Jacques Lacan
The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.
—Philip Roth in The Dying Animal
In Westerns you were permitted to kiss your horse but never your girl.
—Gary Cooper