“I think women need kindness more than love. When one human being is kind to another, it’s a very deep matter.”
–Alice Childress, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights
“Love between women is seen as a paradigm in love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.”
–Elizabeth Janeway, Between Myth and Meaning
“”Love interferes with the fidelities.”
–Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher
“Love in itself she felt should be like the creation of a succession of works of art.”
–Hayashi Fumiko, “Lady Chrysanthemum”
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
–Dorothy Parker, quoted in While Rome Burns
“Marriage: a souvenir of love.”
–Helen Rowland, Reflections of a Bachelor Girl
“If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.”
–Marie Dressler, My Own Story
“There is nothing ridiculous in love.”
–Olive Schreiner, “The Buddhist Priest’s Wife”
“When my self is not with you, it is nowhere.”
–Heloise, Letter to Peter Abelard
“Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.”
–Jean Anouilh
“For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find within his hand a flower as token that he had really been there–what then, what then?”
–Thomas Wolfe
“Touch is the meaning of being human.”
–Andrea Dworkin
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
–George Orwell, 1984
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
–George Orwell, 1984
“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air round him. She had become a physical necessity.”
–George Orwell, 1984
“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.”
–William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“Can one desire too much of a good thing?”
–William Shakespeare, As You Like It
“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
–William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“Love sought is good, but given unsought better.”
–William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.”
–William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116”
“We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and love as we are to die.”
–R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience
“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
–Oscar Wilde
“To refuse the call means stagnation.”
–Joseph Campbell
“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.”
–Denis Diderot
“Tenderness is greater proof of love than the most passionate of vows.”
–Marlene Dietrich
“Touch is the landscape of what is possible.”
–Kate Green
“Love seeketh not itself to please.”
–William Blake, “The Clod and the Pebble”