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“A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“I don't know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 a.m. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“They may not know each other to say it, but it was never hidden. How much ever they hated each other, fate ties them together.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“I have always been quite good at falling in love, but I don’t pretend to know anything about literal happily ever afters. ”
― Jennifer Harrison, Write like no one is reading

“It has been my experience, that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.”
― Agatha Christie, Towards Zero

“...that is the way with love affairs--they occupy your mind wholly for a time, and then they become distant countries where you no longer speak the language and have forgotten all the landmarks.

[Édouard Manet]”
― Maureen Gibbon, The Lost Notebook of Édouard Manet

“en çok temiz olmayı istediÄŸim ÅŸu anda, en beterinden bir pisliÄŸin içine düştüm sanki; gelecek için alabildiÄŸine özgür ama bir o kadar da geçmiÅŸe zincirli.”
― John Fowles(Çev:Meram Arvas)

“I don't want to get landed in an affair which might get beyond my control before I knew where I was.
[...] But darling, Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way. There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that's all. Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven't shocked you [...]”
― Vita Sackville-West

“It is something of a tragedy for young girls of good family that they cannot carry on a love-affair in a simple, straightforward way, in secret, below their station if need be, as do their sisters of humbler origin, who can place their affections wherever they wish without risk of misdirecting a family fortune or making a 'bad match'.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle

“In love affairs, if you keep silence, you lose your beloved, and your fate remains in the way of the dreams forever.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“As I sat on the back of his bike, Anh Bao pointed out local sex workers he recognized as they walked out of a bar with their arms wrapped around Viet Kieu men. He had gotten to know these women when he parked his bike outside the bar around closing time to offer cheap rides home to the women who had been unable to secure a client for the evening. Over the course of nearly three hours spent cycling the city, I took everything in—making mental notes of things I would later enter into my research. Anh Bao was a storyteller; and as we stopped outside each place, I propped on his bike laughing as he made up dramatic scenarios about the kinds of love affairs that occurred in each segment of the sex industry.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang

“Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

“And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel â€� the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“It's ok to lose someone. But it's not ok to lose yourself for someone.”
― Hiral Nagda

“[Love Wasn’t as They Said]
Love wasn’t as they said�
It didn’t last forever as they claimed�
It is fleeting moments only recognized
By those with sight and insight�
And perhaps only captured
By those patiently waiting as if to see a lightning in the sky�
And, like lightning perhaps, we never know
Where love goes after it strikes�
And perhaps the only love that lasts
Is one that know when to stay and when to walk away�
**
Love wasn’t synonymous with honor
As they defined honor...
It is often the awareness that falls upon us
After betraying or letting down the loved ones�
Love wasn’t holding hands forever,
It is boring afternoons spent together
With no words
And no activities�
It wasn’t lifetime sexual attraction
As many claimed�
It is the companionship that remains
After the hormonal fires are put out,
When the noises of immaturity go silent,
And after the childish quarrels and squabbles stop�
It is the home that remains erected
Long after getting erectile dysfunction�
It that appetite for life after the last egg from the last period�
It is that strange feeling of elation
That may come after what is mistakenly called a “midlife crisis�,
To fill that frightening gap between hope and reality�
**
Love is a widow brushing her hair,
On a bus or in a public place,
Unbothered by onlookers or passersby,
As she opens her shabby handbag
And takes out an apple to bite on
With the teeth she has left�
Love is an eye surrounded with wrinkles
But is finally able to see the world
Sensitively, insightfully, and more realistically,
Without exaggerated embellishment or distortion�
**
Love is shreds of joy
Interspersed with long intervals
Of boredom, exhaustion, reproach, and disappointment�
It’s not measured with red flowers, bears, and expensive gifts in shiny wraps,
It is who remains when the glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are high�
It’s those who stay after the heart catheterization and knee replacement surgeries�
Love gets stronger after getting osteoporosis
And may move mountains despite the rheumatism�
**
Love is the few seconds when our eyes cross with strangers
Who awaken in us feelings we hadn’t experienced with those living with us in years�
Or perhaps it’s rubbing arms and shoulders with a passenger
On a bus, in a train, or on a plane�
It is that fleeting look from a passerby in the street
Convey to us that they, too, have understood the game,
But there’s not much they can do about it�
**
Love wasn’t as they said
It wasn’t as they said�
It is not 1+1=2�
It is sometimes three or more�
At other times, it grows at point zero or lower,
In solitude, in loneliness, and in seclusion�
Isn’t it time, I wonder,
to demolish everything falsely, unfairly, and misleadingly
attributed to love?
Or is it that love burns and dies
Precisely when we try to capture it in our hands?

[Original poem published in Arabic on October 27, 2022 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Having a love affair is ecstasy, but marriage is everyday life.”
― Kosho Uchiyama, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo