by Debbie Vance
Valentine’s day is tomorrow, folks. Time for a little romantic reflection on that thing we call love…
What is Love?
Perspectives from Authors Throughout Time & Space
“But now I wonder: Is love an endless feast, or is it what people manage to serve each other when their cupboards are bare.”
-Krista Bremer from My Accidental Jihad
“The disturbed mind and affections, like the tossed sea, seldom calm without an intervening time of confusion and trouble.”
-Charles Dickens on getting over a broken heart
“Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will…there are no age limits for love.”
-Stendhal from his 1822 treatise on love
“Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
-Ambrose Bierce from The Devil’s Dictionary
“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get-only with what you are expecting to give-which is everything.”
-Katharine Hepburn from Me: Stories of My Life
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky from The Brothers Karamazov
“You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
-E.M. Forster from A Room with a View
“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being ‘in love,’ which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.”
-Louis de Bernières in Corelli’s Mandolin
