love
Yet he loved people: it seems that he lived his whole life with an absolute faith in people, though no one ever thought of him as simple or naïve. There was something in him that said, and made you believe (and this was so throughout his life), that he did not wish to sit in judgement on others and would never take it upon himself to censure
... See moreFyodor Dostoevsky • The Karamazov Brothers (Oxford World's Classics)
What if my heart goes deaf?
Franny Choi • Floating, Brilliant, Gone
Love was paring myself down, again and again, until I was as smooth as a block of new marble, ready to become whatever the next one needed me to be.
Gina Chung • Sea Change
What wouldn’t you do to be held? Don’t tell me you’ve never taped shut your own mouth.
Franny Choi • Floating, Brilliant, Gone
Anyone who’s ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there, occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some indefinable tide has turned forever and you can’t go back.
Caroline Knapp • Drinking: A Love Story
That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”
Stephen King • The Shining
Napoleon said men will die for bits of ribbon pinned to their chests, but the General understands that even more men will die for a man who remembered their names, as he does theirs.
Viet Thanh Nguyen • The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
from Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
Objectively, this was not an unusual thought, but in falling in love with her, I had somehow entirely overlooked the possibility of reciprocation. I had counted more on loving than being loved. And if I had concentrated largely on the former dynamic, it was perhaps because being loved is always the more complicated of the two emotions, Cupid’s
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