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L Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All L Quotes

“Love, as I'd understood it- through my mama- wasn't like the wind. Indifference was like that. Wind and indifference went wherever it pleased. Settling down when it benefited them, moving on without warning, even if it ripped a home or two apart on the way out. Love was like the sun- always there. It might've looked like it was moving- but it was forever still.”

“Love—as it is in the wild, no fingerprints on the glass—knows nothing of time. If you were lucky enough for your first fall to be in love and not loss, you might get what I'm talking about. The pure stuff, like flying before you look down. Like learning that the body you thought you had to fill out all by yourself actually came with an extension; that neither worked alone, but together—bam, all of the lights come on. That's how love is supposed to be. When you add in time, however, it does what time always does. Brings everything, eventually, inevitably, to its end. After loss, love is never the same. That is not to say you won't love another, maybe even more than ever before. But as you love them, you will mourn them. You'll try not to, of course. Try to say, "You'll never know." But you do. You know. And every inch gained in flight is an inch added to the fall. That's why, when you're flat-backed on the belt, we don't cut the love out. Every time you manage to think about that which you love—remember a face or a smell—you will be bird-dogged, instantly, by the bone saw of reality. Not how it will end, but how it always has. Love tortures you more than we ever could.”

“Love as much as you can from wherever you are. This line is especially good to recall when you feel frightened, crazy, or have taken some bad dope. Write it on the wall of your room. You may not want to love what you feel or see, you may not be able to convince yourself that you could love it at all. But just decide to love it. Say out loud that you love it, even if you don't believe it. And say, "I love myself for hating this."”

“Love, as she knew it, did not make a person feel vulnerable and defenseless, or generate confusion, or send butterflies in one's stomach! It didn't make one want to laugh and cry at the same time, or feel annoyed and excited in a flash, or want to inflict pain or care for someone simultaneously. It didn't make one despise oneself for responding to a kiss like that, wanting it to end, and yet feeling such unbearable longing and yearning for it, needing it to go on and on and on. Love, she admonished herself firmly, doesn't make one do or feel those things.”

“Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishing the path of enamoration from the Road to Damascus; subsequently ensnared, held fast, immobilised, nose stuck to the image (the mirror). In that moment when the other's image comes to ravish me for the first time, I am nothing more than the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner's wonderful Hen: feet tied, the hen went to sleep with her eyes fixed on the chalk line, which was traced not far from her beak; when she was untied, she remained motionless, fascinated, "submitting to her vanquisher," as the Jesuit says (1646); yet, to waken her from her enchantment, to break off the violence of her Image-repertoire (vehemens animalis imaginatio), it was enough to tap her on the wing; she shook herself and began pecking in the dust again.”