John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter of Advice to His Lovesick Teenage Son

One should strive to love, never to be loved. It's impossible to get love.

In the essay “Love and Need,” Thomas Merton contends: “The expression to ‘fall in love’ reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself—a mixture of fear, awe, fascination, and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable, yet not fully reliable.” If you do not know what you feel, then it is d

There was a whisper—not even a rumor but rather an unsaid feeling—in my family that it was love drove him out, and not love of the wife he married.

“Never fear sadness, as it tends to sit right next to love.” An email from a ninety-eight-year-old family friend who had spent his career as a Hollywood writer yielded a personal favorite: “Never raise your voice, except at a ball game.” His eighty-eight-year-old wife, a former soap opera star whom he had met on set and fallen desperately in love w

And it’s the thing my mind kept swirling back to over these five weeks since you wrote to me and said you didn’t know the definition of “love.” It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacri