much ado about love

[effulgentsky]

Why do people read romance novels and watch romance films, when actual love is so much more than what's in them? Your love is ten times more genuine, more touching than any cliché love story on the big screen. I've never been a fan of movies like Love Actually or A Walk To Remember. The romance flick I adore the most has got to be Before Sunrise.

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[xunfazedx]

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like 'maybe we should just be friends' or 'how perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love."

-Neil Gaiman, Rose Walker-The Sandman Series in The Kindly Ones

[effulgentsky]

"They say that love between two people grows slowly over time and becomes deeper and richer with the years. That is nonsense. I now know that real love sweeps into one's life with the fury of a sudden storm. It is instant and powerful. Nothing else matters. Reason, restraint, judgment are swept away with the force of a swollen river surging past its banks, and nothing-not thought or feeling, sensations or life itself-can ever be the same again."

- Carolly Erickson, The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette

[xunfazedx]

"Love? said the Commander.

That's better. That's something I know about. We can talk about that.

Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they said once, but we reversed that, and love, like Heaven, was always around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh

[effulgentsky]

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it up carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is hell."

- C.S. Lewis

[xunfazedx]

“What is the difference between love and obsession? Didn't both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn't you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn't every man in love a fool and every woman a slave?

Love was like rain: it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.”

- The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman