“Although ‘making love’ may serve as a polite name for an act that has many rude ones, it’s misleading. For lovers do not so much make love as they are remade by love—dipped into the fire, melted down, reshaped. If they are devoted to one another, love will transform them, dissolving the shells of their old separate selves and making them anew.”
—Scott Russell Sanders, from A Private History of Awe (North Point Press, 2006)
You see through love, and that deludes your sight,
As what is straight seems crooked through the water,
—John Dryden, from Thoughts, Selected from the Ancient and Modern Poets (Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1828)
“Your love was a bit muted, as your voice. One might say you loved askance, and never spoke about love.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, from “Sounds” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage International, 1997)
“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the ‘blaze of passion’ often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.”
—Boris Pasternak, from Doctor Zhivago (Feltrinelli, 1957)
Poetry is made in a bed like love
Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things
—André Breton, from “On the Road to San Romano”, in The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Yale University Press, 2004)
(Source: litverve)
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
—Hermann Hesse
Love is forever up
too high in the branches to reach
and too disorganized to fit together
once you get down to it, like Aesop
mixing it up with his own fables.
—Landis Everson, closing lines to “Hollyhocks” in Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006)
Our hearts were large and greedy,
and we were young enough to think
the world couldn’t fill them.
—Mark Brazaitis, closing lines to section 1 of “Two Countries,” from The Other Language (ABZ Poetry Press, 2009)
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
—Claude Monet
I think I’m through with being in love with people
though I’ll love mountains as only a flatlander can. To be awed
by something so big and unyielding that your desire
to conquer it never dies, though you know in your heart,
liver, neurons, axons, dendrites and womb, that it will
never happen …
—Shaindel Beers, from “A Brief History of Time” in A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009)
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