The Lover Quotes

The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.
- Martin Amis

The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?
- Katharine Anthony

I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers.
- Piers Anthony

Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.
- Plato

Therefore, even the lover of myth is a philosopher; for myth is composed of wonder.
- Aristotle

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Indeed, at hearing the news that 'the old god is dead', we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation - finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an 'open sea'.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the lover into the light--what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it easily deceives regarding his normality.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.
- James Baldwin

Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.
- Clive Barker

The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.
- Djuna Barnes

But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
- Amelia Barr

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.
- John Barth

Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
- Roland Barthes

The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
- Roland Barthes

Am I in love? - Yes, since I'm waiting. The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.
- Roland Barthes

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
- Charles Baudelaire

Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores.
- E M Forster

So the lovers fall into the background. They are part of the distant sunrise, and only the mountains speak to them. Rickie talks to Mr Pembroke, amidst the unlit valleys of our over-habitable world.
- E M Forster

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
- William Shakespeare

Here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth. Joy, gentle friends! joy and fresh days of love Accompany your hearts!
- William Shakespeare

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
- Jorge Luis Borges

It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.
- Christian Nestell Bovee

Cross that rules the Southern Sky!
Stars that sweep, and turn, and fly
Hear the Lovers' Litany: -
'Love like ours can never die!
- Rudyard Kipling

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.
- Frederick Buechner

Your letters got sadder. Your lovers betrayed you. Kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. It didn't help. You said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.
- Charles Bukowski

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
- Gilbert K Chesterton

The love story for me was the nature of the love and not the age of the lovers.
- Kate Capshaw

The beloved's innocence
brutalizes the lover.
As the singing of a mad person
behind you on the train
enrages you,
its beautiful
animal-like teeth
shining amid black planes
of paint.
As Helen
enrages history.
Senza uscita.
- Anne Carson

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, "whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.
- Michael Chabon

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
- Marc Chagall

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows..
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own ends, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There comes a time in the seeker's life when he discovers that he is at once the lover and the beloved.
- Sri Chinmoy

The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the water oaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet. Their heads might have been turned upside down, so absolutely did they tread upon blue ether.
- Kate Chopin

Beauty is the lover's gift.
- William Congreve

It has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature.
- Henry David Thoreau

He learned, though slowly, what all great harrowed lovers learn: that love is what most surely compels love -- is perhaps, except for brute force, the only thing that does, though only (and this was the terrible gift he had been given) when the lover truly believes, as August could, that when his love is strong enough it must surely be returned -- and August's was.
- John Crowley

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
- Virginia Woolf

There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.
- Don Delillo

Did the harebell loose her girdle
To the lover bee,
Would the bee the harebell hallow
Much as formerly?
- Emily Dickinson

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
- Milan Kundera

People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectations of shipwreck, sun, and death. The liners the little white girl knew were among the last mailboats in the world. It was while she was young that the first airlines were started, which were gradually to deprive mankind of journeys across the sea. (The Lover)
- Marguerite Duras

So the lover must struggle for words.
- T S Eliot

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
- T S Eliot

And it was during this period that Madeleine fully understood how the lover's discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn't physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.
- Jeffrey Eugenides

The lovers discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasnt physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.
- Jeffrey Eugenides

You come on as a guest. You don't get the girl anymore. But that is our lives. You start off as the boyfriend, then you are the lover, then you are the husband, then you are the father, and then you are the grandfather.
- Albert Finney

They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.
- Janet Fitch

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
- Victor Hugo

It took a long time, but my heart now feels full when I think of him. When you fall in love againwhich I haveit's funny the other things that come back in with that open-ness. You have this ghost chorus of the lovers who came before, but they're benign now, they're good spirits.
- Emma Forrest

For what the lover would, that would the beloved; what she would ask of him that should he go before to grant. Without accord such as this, love is but a bond and a constraint.
- Marie De France

There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
- Carson Mccullers

The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
- Carson Mccullers

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.
- Rollo May

you can not fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of.
-Antonio munoz molinas, the power of the pen
- Cornelia Funke

The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don't look like much of a minstrel, and you're pardon me for saying so lad, but it's true ordinary as cheese crumbs. So it's love if you ask me.
- Neil Gaiman

I am the lover's gift; I am the wedding wreath;
I am the memory of a moment of happiness;
I am the last gift of the living to the dead;
I am a part of joy and a part of sorrow.
- Kahlil Gibran

One's lover is one's partner in observing and understanding the world. Marriage is a place where joint narratives are composed. If the lover is a liar then all your joint observations are unreliable. You will have to start all over again.
- Philippa Gregory

And when love is over when the diner of love seems closed from the outside you want all those hours back along with anything you left at the lover's house and maybe a couple of things which aren't technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside.
- Daniel Handler

When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Love... requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.
- Steven Heighton

Someday we'll find it. The Rainbow Connection. The lovers, the dreamers, and me.
- Jim Henson

...There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper, irresistiblemagic to make the sanest man go mad.
- Homer

I can count all the lovers I've had on one hand...if I'm holding a calculator.
- Sebastian Horsley

Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.
- Caryll Houselander

It nods and curtseys and recovers
When the wind blows above,
The nettle on the graves of lovers
That hanged themselves for love.
The nettle nods, the wind blows over,
The man, he does not move,
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love.
- A E Housman

You smile upon your friend to-day,
To-day his ills are over;
You hearken to the lover's say,
And happy is the lover.
'Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
But better late than never:
I shall have lived a little while
Before I die for ever.
- A E Housman

When the lad for longing sighs,
Mute and dull of cheer and pale,
If at death's own door he lies,
Maiden, you can heal his ail.
Lovers' ills are all to buy:
The wan look, the hollow tone,
The hung head, the sunken eye,
You can have them for your own.
Buy them, buy them: eve and morn
Lovers' ills are all to sell.
Then you can lie down forlorn;
But the lover will be well.
- A E Housman

Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain.
- Aldous Huxley

[L]ove ought to manifest itself in deeds rather than in words.... love consists in a mutual sharing of goods, for example, the lover gives and shares with the beloved what he possesses, or something of that which he has or is able to give; and vice versa, the beloved shares with the lover. Hence, if one has knowledge, he shares it with the one who does not possess it; and so also if one has honors, or riches. Thus, one always gives to the other.
- Ignatius Loyola

I put the lover in clover. Especially if there are four leaves.
- Jarod Kintz

She was telling me that I had a life of disappointment before me if I continued to love him as I did. A love that is too strong can turn poisonous and bring great unhappiness. And then, what is the remedy? Can you unlearn your heart's desire? Can you stop loving someone? Easier to drown yourself; easier to take the lover's leap.
- Alma Katsu

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.
- Jack Kerouac

He was my husband, my apartment mate, my soul mate, the father of the little plant in my confused soil, the lover who had made me adore his body without inhibition after my years of relative solitude, the person for whom I'd given up my old self.
- Elizabeth Kostova

It is a beautiful trait in the lover's character, that they think no evil of the object loved.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Real love should draw no blood from the loved and buckets from the lover.
- Emily Maguire

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.
- Thomas Mann

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
- Henri Matisse

Rosemary, in his heart your brother is a lover. The shrewd businessman, the adventurer, the dandy are but costumes the lover wears.
- Donald Mccaig

But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
- Ian Mcewan

It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.
- Lorrie Moore

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.
Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse
Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.
- Lorrie Moore

Love is never any better than the lover.
- Toni Morrison

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.
- John Muir

Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. "So he's been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued by a sun priest offering to pleasure"
"Every nook and cranny," Marietta interrupted dryly and Gabrielle tipped her head back with a throaty laugh.
-The Lover's Gift Regained
- Michelle O Leary

He knows that kind of love. It is what he feels for Gallicina. It is the world reformed, made new, each time the lover sees the beloved's face. It is the miracle which makes the cosmos dance, which keeps the planets in their courses, which fuels the fire of the stars. It is salvation.
- Susan Palwick

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
- Marge Piercy

I remember the lightning in the air, and the lovers bidding goodbye to each other in the streets, and I can tell you what I think. We went to war because going to war is fun, because there's something in the human breast that trills at the thought, although perhaps not the reality, of murdering its fellows in vast numbers. Fighting a war ain't fun - fighting a war is pretty miserable. But starting a war? Hell, starting a war is better than a night floating on daeva's honey.
- Daniel Polansky

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.
- Theodor Reik

The blue sky blushed to see such passionate lovemaking, while the Florentine sun smiled down, warming the lovers despite the gentle breeze.
- Sylvain Reynard

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be.
- Rumi

When the rose is gone and the garden faded
you will no longer hear the nightingale's song.
The Beloved is all; the lover just a veil.
The Beloved is living; the lover a dead thing.
If love withholds its strengthening care,
the lover is left like a bird without care,
the lover is left like a bird without wings.
How will I be awake and aware
if the light of the Beloved is absent?
Love wills that this Word be brought forth.
- Rumi

Two there are who are never satisfied -- the lover of the world and the lover of knowledge.
- Rumi

There came one and knocked at the door of the Beloved.
And a voice answered and said, 'Who is there?'
The lover replied, 'It is I.'
'Go hence,' returned the voice;
'there is no room within for thee and me.'
Then came the lover a second time and knocked and again the voice demanded,
'Who is there?'
He answered, 'It is thou.'
'Enter,' said the voice, 'for I am within.
- Rumi

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of
spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.
and the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At
night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its
face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language door and
open the lovers window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.
- Rumi

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
- George Santayana

Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, has this ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there's angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know?
- George Saunders

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.
- Shakira

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
- Richard Siken

Is it that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. when no glance , no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. when each moment , each perception is brought out with care , unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved - turned this way and that , examined , considered.
- Ahdaf Soueif

The lovers of the world are the ones who matter. Forget the rest. Jesus was a lover. He doesn't hate anyone.
- Scylar Tyberius

Live for the lovers, not the haters!
- Scylar Tyberius

I think if you do something effectively whether you're the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play; movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you'll get asked to play that part again.
- Christopher Walken

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.
- David Foster Wallace

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
- Thomas Wolfe

Wise Christian worship takes fully into account the fact that creation has gone horribly wrong, has been so corrupted and spoiled that a great fault line runs right down the middle of it... worship of God as redeemer, the lover and rescuer of the world, must always accompany and complete the worship of God as creator.
- N T Wright