Difficult Time In Love Quotes & Sayings

It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no. — Siri Hustvedt

All that time tying herself up in knots because she simply couldn't think of
a good reason not to be with him — Chris Manby

It was because all we wanted was each other's constant love and attention and for no one else to receive that love and attention, which is a selfish and difficult place to be in a relationship. We were emotionally retarded, and that was the best we could do at the time. — Anthony Kiedis

I am the first to say that ours is a complex and difficult country and some of our complexities are indeed grotesque. We who are Negro Americans can offer that last remark with unwavering insistence. It is, on the other hand, also a great nation with certain beautiful and indestructible traditions and potentials which can be seized by all of who possess imagination and love of man. There is, as a certain play suggests, a great deal to be fought in America - but, at the same time, there is so much which begs to be but re-affirmed and cherished with sweet defiance. — Lorraine Hansberry

We humans, once we have become emotionally invested in a homeplace, a prized personal possession, or, especially, in another person, find it immensely difficult to give them up ... Because they were made at a time of life when we were utterly dependent on them, the love attachments of infancy have inordinate power over us, more than any other emotional investment. — Louise J. Kaplan

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation ... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances ... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Beauty made you love, love made you beautiful ...
She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn't want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here; the marvelous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings
feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Love is wanting to be with someone all the time.It is accepting the other person with all good qualities and bad and not wanting to change any of them. It is wanting to give affection and approval and comfort and everything that is oneself,demanding nothing in return. It is - love is very difficult, Julia. It is an ideal, rarely achieved in reality because we are all selfish and imperfect beings. It is a dream, a goal, something to be aimed for. — Mary Balogh

Poetry is difficult, I mean interesting poetry, not confessional babble or emotive propaganda. Reading a new poet is discovering an entire world, what Stevens called a 'mundo' and it takes a lot of time to orientate oneself in such a world. What we have to learn to do then, as teachers and militants of a poetic insurgency, is to encourage people to learn to love the difficulty of poetry. I simply do not understand much of the poetry that I love. — Simon Critchley

You have to choose love ... in the most difficult of time to shift the paradigm to that which is love. — Oprah Winfrey

It could be that our longing for Revolution is like our longing for perfect love, the impulse we all have for union that was for so long met by religion. However we assign these yearnings, it is difficult to ignore the obvious need for change. Some of us will ascribe it to romantic love, some to consumerism, some to utopianism. It doesn't really matter. What is important is that for the first time in history we have the means to implement a truly representative system, the means to globally communicate it, and the conditions that require it. — Russell Brand

Those who take lightly promises they make to those they love are people who find little lasting satisfaction in life. This is not an easy time in which to live. That does not mean that it has to be a difficult time to love, but it does mean that you will find unusual stresses upon your lives and your relationship. — Brandon Sanderson

Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as "romantic" or "foolish" marriages; one even made a runaway match, and languished for a while under a cloud of social reprobation. Here, then, was passion in action, romance converted to reality; yet the heroines of these exploits returned from them untransfigured, and their husbands were as dull as ever when one had to sit next to them at dinner. Her own case, of course, would be different. — Edith Wharton

I love Calgary. It's a great city. I enjoyed my time there, quite a bit. Shooting and filming in that cold could be very difficult, at times. When you're shooting nights, and it's 3 in the morning and minus 35 degrees, that's hard to work in. — Colin Hanks

I'm still trying to decide. It's a really difficult one because I really enjoy my time in the Air Force. And I'd love to continue it. But the pressures of my other life are building. And fighting them off or balancing the two of them has proven quite difficult. — Prince William

For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one's grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: 'I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.' I said also: 'I shall probably not see you again;' I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen. — Marcel Proust

He opened his eyes to reveal the storm within him. "My every instinct is telling me to have my way with you." He was dead serious and my cheeks heated. Fire shone in his eyes and I broke eye contact, burying my face into his cotton-covered chest. "But not nearly as difficult as going all this time without you," he said. — Wendy Higgins

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 once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just 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.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. — Margaret Atwood

Earlier, when I made my coffee (after releasing my grateful geese), I sat at the big Northridge desk and got out the Edward Curtis portfolio for breakfast reading. When I untied the first folio there was a note - "Dalva & Ruth. Wash your hands. I love you. Grandpa." A simple old note, brittle with age, but I was momentarily overcome with loneliness for her; at the same time, though, I knew in a deeper sense that I was totally out of the running. In the long and short of it, love is a more difficult subject than sex. Or history. I — Jim Harrison

One of the many quotes on love ... Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language
and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance. — Catherynne M Valente

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so ... — Michael Cunningham

This is not an easy time in which to live. That does not mean that it has to be a difficult time to love... — Brandon Sanderson

I don't know what would I have done without you in this difficult time for me and indeed, you are right, things happen for a reason and even mistakes help us to be better. — Auliq Ice

Once I had thought I was whole -- had seemed to be able to love a man, to bear a child, to heal the sick--and know that all these things were natural parts of me, not the difficult, troubled fragments into which my life had now disintegrated. But that had been in the past, the man I had loved was Jamie, and for a time, I had been part of something greater than myself. — Diana Gabaldon

Falling in love for the first time, and then the heartbreak of having it end, is difficult, but I don't think it would ever hurt as much as when my mother was killed in the boating accident. I feel a part of my heart has already been broken, and that place is reserved for mother. — Natasha Gregson Wagner

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. — Mark Helprin

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story. — Shannon L. Alder

Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an "end" is intolerable to me. — Henry Miller

I have a difficult relationship with jazz. My parents really love it, and I went to a school where jazz was considered the best thing ever, so I had to leave it be for a long time. But now I'm rediscovering it. I'm approaching jazz in a different way. — Agnes Obel

A distant love that waits to be together, is by far the most difficult relationship. It's like lighting a candle, and adoring the long flame and robust glow. Until time sets in like wax, overflowing deeper and deeper into the wick, leaving a sparse flame struggling to live. This is where most distant relationships fade, with the wax smothering the flame. This kind of relationship takes patience, hope, unconditional love, trust and strength, all centered around God. If the flame endures to the end, and the two come together, only then will it feel as if the candle was tipped and all the wax came pouring out, when the flame is revived, long and glowing again. — Anthony Liccione

In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced. — Robert Sexton

If you find it difficult to love the human in someone, then love the divine in him or her. The divine in that person is God. God exists in that person just as God exists in you. To love God is extremely easy because God is divine and perfect. Each time you look at an individual, if you can consciously become aware of God's existence in him or her, then you will not be disturbed by his or her imperfections or limitations. — Sri Chinmoy

I could give one, if you wish," Sazed said, "but I do not think you need one. I have known you both for some time, and am willing to give my blessing to this union. I simply offer counsel. Those who take lightly promises they make to those they love are people who find little lasting satisfaction in life. This is not an easy time in which to live. That does not mean that it has to be a difficult time to love, but it does mean that you will find unusual stresses upon your lives and your relationship. "Do not forget the love oath you made to each other this evening. It will give you much strength in the days to come, I think. — Brandon Sanderson

A movie set, Julia, is a tiny, intimate world, divorced from reality. No, immune to it." She smiled to herself. "Fantasy, however difficult the work, is its own addiction. Which is why so many of us delude ourselves into believing we've fallen desperately in love with another character in that shiny bubble - for the length of time it takes to create a film. — Nora Roberts

Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when - in this moment of deprivation - the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage - the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively. — Marcel Proust

Nothing is more difficult and nothing requires more character than to find oneself in open opposition to ones time (and those one loves) and to say loudly: No! — Kurt Tucholsky

Sanny,' he said quietly, emphatically, 'besides all the obvious aspects of love - the infatuation, the attraction, the feelings of closeness and belonging - besides all that, Sanny, love is a decision. That's what keeps it going in the long run, through bad time and difficult situation,' Mark said softly. 'Love isn't just something you feel, some state of mind you have no control over. Love needs nurturing to stay alive, and that is a conscious decision every day, Sanny. It expresses itself in all the little daily things that happen between people.' His hands slid down her back and he drew her closer. 'Love doesn't just stop or fly out the window. It dies from neglect.'
He paused.
'Sanny,' he continued softly, 'I love you. My promise to you is that I will not neglect that love. — Karen Van Der Zee

I work my way through the rest of my dates, but I'm only there in body. The boys usually give up after the first hour; it's difficult to have a conversation all by yourself. My ratings plummet, but at least my air-time is minimal now, I'm not offering much in the way of entertainment these days. — Siobhan Davis

Nick leans down and kisses my eyelids. "Loving you, Zara, is a full-time job. It's a great job, don't get me wrong. It's the best job in the universe. But it is not easy, because you tend to . . ."
"Get hurt?" Betty suggests. "Find trouble? Pass out? Break arms?"
"All of the above." Nick laughs.
My hand finds Nick's wrist and I grab onto its thickness. "You know, I'm the patient here. Where's the bedside manner? Where's the sympathy?"
"Zara, sympathy is just a good excuse to buy greeting cards and make sorry eyes and secretly gloat over how glad you are that you aren't the person whose crap is hanging out there for the world to see," Betty says. — Carrie Jones

We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me. — Banana Yoshimoto

Before you ever get the person you really want in your life, you will be tested with every person that was wrong for you. You will be tempted with what was easy, what was familiar, what was only physical, what was safe and what was simply a friend to pull you out of a difficult situation because you didn't want to be alone. When you finally meet the person you were meant to be with you won't have to guess, decide or choose. You will be drawn to them. They will seem to fit who you are, but at the same time have the missing pieces that makes you want to become a better person. There is no need to be guarded because this soul is like your own and talking to them about the deepest things in life are effortless. They won't be like any other you have met and you will find yourself looking for parts of them in everyone you meet. — Shannon L. Alder

But chains made out of blood and memory were a thousand times more difficult to sever than those made of steel, and the past could overtake a person if she wasn't careful"
"The day had begun, cool and clear and absolutely impossible to avoid"
"Being a physician is like working on a machine that keeps breaking down, time after time"
"Honesty was like a stone, dropped and irretrievable once it was spoken aloud"
"Love was like that, like a dream you didn't quite understand, one in which you didn't necessarily know what you were looking at until it was right in front of you"
"adolescence is what makes the person — Alice Hoffman

At LeakyCon, a young lady asked me how I dealt with bullying. I wasn't able to give her a very good answer, which troubles me. Well, there were lots of shouts of "It gets better" and "Stay strong" and "We love you". But when I put myself back in time to when I was being bullied, none of those things would've helped me. Yes, absolutely it does get better. But when you are being physically and psychologically tortured, it is difficult to remove yourself from the pressingness of the moment at hand. Here's how I dealt with bullying: I cried, I hated myself, I hated my life. I didn't deal with it, I survived it, but I never dealt with it. So here are two tips from someone with lots of experience. 1: It's not about you, it has nothing to do with you, it's about the assholes doing it to you. 2: Your job is not to deal with it, your job is to survive it, which you CAN do because it WILL end. And then yes, it will get better. — Hank Green

If she has given you children remind yourself every day of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth words in this sentence. If you hurt her in ways that are irreparable I will send out people to hurt you back, sorry, but it has to be like that. Yes, you may have had a difficult childhood, but please allow me to introduce myself: Hello, I am the woman who doesn't give a shit. Make her something warm to drink in the mornings and give her time to begin speaking; only rush at her with an embrace or a gemstone. Wildflowers. A love note. Yeats. — Mary-Louise Parker

Think about your particular assignment at this time in your life. It may be to get an education, it may be to rear children, it may be to be a grandparent, it may be to care for an relieve the suffering of someone you love, it may be to do a job in the most excellent way possible, it may be to support someone who has a difficult assignment of their own. Our assignments are varied and they change from time to time. Don't take them lightly. Give them your full heart and energy. Do them with enthusiasm. Do whatever you have to do this week with your whole heart and soul. To do less than this will leave you with an empty feeling. — Marjorie Pay Hinckley

Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I love the romance of the '40s. It was the perfect time to live. Technology wasn't so advanced that it made life more difficult, but it was just enough that you can send a phone call or a telegram. And people still took pride in how they looked. The men got dressed up and the women got dressed up and they took care of themselves. — Bethany Joy Lenz

God will place a variety of people in your life who will not necessarily love you in a way that makes you feel loved completely. Adapt to that and try to just see through to their heart and what life experiences may have caused their love limits. Forgiveness is extremely difficult but necessary. It make take time and serious effort, but choose daily to live in the now and let go of grudges. — T. TaJuan Mercer

I love the tour bunks. I can sleep like a baby in those bunks. It really doesn't bother me at all. A lot of people have a difficult time - they're like, 'It's like a coffin.' I get in there and I just pass out. You can't even wake me up. — Joe Jonas

Loving kindness is a form of love that truly is an ability, and, as research scientists have show, it can be learned. It is the ability to take some risks with our awareness-to look at ourselves and others with kindness instead of reflexive criticism; to include in our concern those to whom we normally pay no attention; to care for ourselves unconditionally instead of thinking, "I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake." It is the ability to gather our attention and really listen to others, even those we've written off as not worth our time. It is the ability to see the humanity in people we don't know and the pain in people we find difficult. — Sharon Salzberg

Humanity must never lose hope. Our present conflicts and differences are difficult but not hopeless. We cannot expect people of such different races, cultures, languages, ways of life and beliefs, who have lived for thousands of years separated from each other to suddenly love each other and work together harmoniously. It takes time and patience. We must work on it stubbornly and not throw in the towel. — Robert Muller

We've been married for more than eight years now and we're still into it. I think you do fall in and out of love and you just keep going, and every time you go through a really difficult phase, you rediscover something new and it just gets better. — Gwyneth Paltrow

Teachers can make such a profound impact on our lives and should be honored as heroes, I believe. They're working for so little money, under such difficult circumstances, usually for the love of the service to the children. Many of us owe who we are to certain teachers who appeared at just the right time, in the right place, and had just the right words to say to propel us on our journey. (ACTIVITY ALERT: Take this opportunity, partway through this ridiculous book, to reach out to a teacher who made an impact on you and THANK THEM. You'll be so glad you did. And so will they!) — Rainn Wilson

Strangely, producing "Parisienne" was very long and difficult because the people who mainly finance films didn't understand the idea of a young foreign girl having a good time in Paris. They wanted to see her suffering and poor, and definitely not falling in love with three French men! — Danielle Arbid

The difficult tasks to be performed are not the ones that mean physical and mental labor, but the ones that you dislike, are the ones that you do not love. There are unpleasant angles to nearly every important job to be done in this world, but there must be an over all love for doing each, else precious time and effort are uselessly wasted. I shall never forget noting a sign above a construction job that read: "Builder of Difficult Foundations." That man must have loved that calling, else he would not have made a point of advertising the fact! — George Matthew Adams

There is nothing so necessary, but at the same time there is nothing more difficult (I know it by experience) for you young fellows, than to know how to behave yourselves prudently towards those whom you do not like. Your passions are warm, and your heads are light; you hate all those who oppose your views, either of ambition or love; and a rival, in either, is almost a synonymous term for any enemy. — Lord Chesterfield

Optimism is contagious, he states.
If that were the case, all your would have to do is go to the person you loved with a huge grin, full of plans and ideas, and know how to present the package. Does it work? No. What is really contagious is fear, the constant fear of never finding someone to accompany us to the end of our days. And in the name of this fear we are capable of doing anything, including accepting the wrong person and convincing ourselves that he or she's the one, the only one, who God has placed in our path. In very little time the search for security turns into a heartfelt love, and things become less bitter and difficult. Our feelings can be put in a box and pushed to the back of the closet in our head, where it will remain forever, hidden and invisible. — Paulo Coelho

Being in deep devotion comes as a surprise the first time, because it is so difficult for people to feel even love, and devotion is the highest form of love ... just the essential fragrance of love. If love is the flower, then devotion is just the fragrance. You cannot catch hold of it. You can feel it, you can smell it, you can be surrounded by it, you can be drowned in it, but you cannot catch hold of it. It is not that material. — Rajneesh

It can be difficult to leave a long-term relationship, even when our inner-wisdom tells us it's time to let go. At this point, we can choose let go and endure the intense pain of leaving behind the familiar to make way for a new chapter in our life. Or we can stay and suffer a low-grade pain that slowly eats away at our heart and soul, like an emotional cancer. Until we wake up, one day and realize, we are buried so deep in the dysfunction of the relationship that we scarcely remember who we were and what we wanted and needed to be. — Jaeda DeWalt

So, where are you from?" Agent Carson asked Reyes. "Originally?"
I whirled around to face him again, this time pinning him with a warning glare. Carson was an FBI agent, but I was all about stealth. Surely she wouldn't pick up on my silent threat.
He studied my mouth, not the least bit worried about my warning glare, then said at last, "Here and there."
I relaxed against the seatback. He didn't say hell. Thank God he didn't say hell. It was always hard to explain to friends how, exactly, one's fiance was born and raised in the eternal flames of damnation. How his father was, in fact, public enemy number one. And how he escaped from hell and was born on earth as a human to be with his true love. As romantic as it all sounded, it was difficult to articulate without garnering a visit from men with butterfly nets. — Darynda Jones

He knew she was his lifemate when she was just a child, and he had given her time. Space. Unconditional love. He never demanded anything of her. He never told her how difficult it was for him - that she was his salvation - just out of his reach. He had always been there for her, in the middle of the night, when her violent past was too close and she couldn't sleep, when nightmares haunted her to the point she couldn't breathe. He was there, in her mind, holding all those terrifying memories at bay. Dimitri. Her Dimitri. — Christine Feehan

The emphasis and the reason for a pure humility is to result in love for others; not always necessarily the belittlement of self. When there is pride and self-righteousness and being pretentiously too far above, generally, one has a difficult time reaching the compassionate side of love for others, the side that understands (or at least attempts to understand): 'I am aware that I am not so far from falling in the same way.' Humility seeks to understand, and sometimes even relate; and in result, the love lovingly, properly, effectively wills the removal of the destructive sins of another as from oneself. — Criss Jami

It will be well for him if at such times he listens only to his Master's word, for other and evil advisers come with their suggestions. Despair whispers, "Lie down and die; give it all up." But God would have us put on a cheerful courage, and even in our worst times, rejoice in his love and faithfulness. Cowardice says, "Retreat; go back to the worldling's way of action; you cannot play the Christian's part, it is too difficult. Relinquish your principles." But, however much Satan may urge this course upon you, you cannot follow it if you are a child of God. His divine fiat has bid thee go from strength to strength, and so thou shalt, and neither death nor hell shall turn thee from thy course. What, if for a while thou art called to stand still, yet this is but to renew thy strength for some greater advance in due time. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There have been a dozen times in the past when I should have liked a particular gentleman. When it would have been convenient, and appropriate, and easy. But no, I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it's been trampled by elephants, thrown into the Amazon, and eaten by piranhas."
Amelia smiled at her compassionately. Her gloved hand slipped over Beatrix's. "Darling Bea. Would it console you to hear that such feelings of infatuation are perfectly ordinary?"
Beatrix turned her palm upward, returning the clasp of her sister's hand. Since their mother had died when Bea was twelve, Amelia had been a source of endless love and patience. "Is it infatuation?" she heard herself asking softly. "Because it feels much worse than that. Like a fatal disease."
"I don't know, dear. It's difficult to tell the difference between love and infatuation. Time will reveal it, eventually. — Lisa Kleypas

To love, we need to be sensitive to those around us, which is impossible if we are racing through life engrossed in all the things we need to do before sunset. In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that a person who is always late will find it difficult to love; he will be in too much of a hurry. — Eknath Easwaran