Inability To Love Quotes & Sayings

All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was for ever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to remember the features of Gilberte's face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her. — Marcel Proust

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It's the inability to relate to another human being. It's the inability to love. — Richard Yates

I was in awe of the mystery of human compassion and the inability of love to make the distance between us any more bearable. — Keith Hollihan

I had loved her as a mother, and though she had put forth her best effort to love me as a son, a difference existed after she learned the truth from Delia. Yet I did not hold her responsible; how could I blame her for an inability to love the part of me that I, too, loathed? — Kathleen Grissom

Attachments that are not fostered may lend to the child's inability to properly attach or have no attachment at all. — Asa Don Brown

Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities. — Fred Rogers

History as a whole is the struggle between love and the inability to love, between love and the refusal to love. — Pope Benedict XVI

This Beloved of ours is merciful and good. Besides, he so deeply longs for our love that he keeps calling us to come closer. This voice of his is so sweet that the poor soul falls apart in the face of her own inability to instantly do whatever he asks of her. And so you can see, hearing him hurts much more than not being able to hear him ... For now, his voice reaches us through words spoken by good people, through listening to spiritual talks, and reading sacred literature. God calls to us in countless little ways all the time. Through illnesses and suffering and through sorrow he calls to us. Through a truth glimpsed fleetingly in a state of prayer he calls to us. No matter how halfhearted such insights may be, God rejoices whenever we learn what he is trying to teach us. — Teresa Of Avila

Men love to be forgiven. It makes us feel better about our inability to learn from our mistakes." Leo Hathaway — Lisa Kleypas

Sometimes your inability to let go has nothing to do with real love and everything to do with what that person represents in your life. Why do you give them so much importance? Why do you believe that God doesn't love you enough that he would not bring someone else into your life? Why do you put up with less than you deserve? — Shannon L. Alder

I doubt if it is given to the human being to understand completely the blessed passion and precious death, the mighty resurrection and glorious ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. I know that I do not understand. But I also know that it has nothing to do with the angry unforgiving God who so upset my young friend. If the basic definition of sin is lack of love (that love without which all men are dead in the sight of God, as Cranmer wrote in one of his collects), then an inability to forgive is lack of love, and if God is unable to forgive us then he is lacking in love, and so he is not God. At least, he is not the God who makes glad my heart. — Madeleine L'Engle

Dads. It's time to tell our kids that we love them. Constantly. It's time to show our kids that we love them. Constantly. It's time to take joy in their twenty-thousand daily questions and their inability to do things as quickly as we'd like. It's time to take joy in their quirks and their ticks. It's time to take joy in their facial expressions and their mispronounced words. It's time to take joy in everything that our kids are. — Dan Pearce

Your inability to see the wisdom in someone else is not a reflection on their lack of perspicacity, it is a reflection on yours. — Ilyas Kassam

Children bring an awesome responsibility. We are entrusted with the task of shaping the lives of real people, with all their potential to do good or harm. At times, it is highly inconvenient. They disturb our sleep; they interfere with our plans; they stir up dormant and unresolved passions. And yet, as we seek to teach them, they are teaching us. They teach us what sacrifice is all about. The total dependence of a baby upon us, their powerlessness to reciprocate what we do for them, their inability to say thank you, all lead us to become less selfish. We are forced to change, to grow up, to look at the needs of another, to raise our boredom threshold, to develop patience, to deal with our insecurities, to become more whole. We are learning to love. — Nicky Lee

Psalm 63 offers insight into the satisfied soul. Look at David's descriptions of satisfaction: "My soul thirsts for you, / my body longs for you, / in a dry and weary land" (v. 1). "Because your love is better than life, / my lips will glorify you" (v. 3). "My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods" (v. 5). The most obvious symptom of a soul in need of God's satisfaction is a sense of inner emptiness. The awareness of a "hollow place" somewhere deep inside - the inability to be satisfied. — Beth Moore

There was something about total loyalty, uncritical devotion, endless patience, perpetual forgiveness and the general inability to believe that a loved one could ever do anything wrong that, frankly, just gave him the creeps. — Joanne Harris

The inability to lie is far from the love of truth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love; husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up. — Tom Lehrer

The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long time might be wrong. That's all. Not that it is. Just that it might be. I don't know why it is, but we tend to fall in love with things we believe, Threaten them, and you threaten us. — Jack McDevitt

Your cowardly self-delusions about "love" when you know as well as I do that there's never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other's weakness- that's why. That's why I couldn't stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that's why I can't stand to let you touch me, and that's why I'll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say — Richard Yates

When we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves, or when we intentionally create pain for others, we poison our own physical and spiritual systems. By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person's emotional resources. The challenge ... is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness. — Caroline Myss

Hell is the inability to love. — Leo Tolstoy

I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat "I will not love you." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The great problem a mother has is not a lack of creativity, accomplishment, or skill, but her inability to love God and others as Jesus loves her. — Gloria Furman

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between — Paul Kalanithi

The fundamental problem most patients have is an inability to love themselves, having been unloved by others during some crucial part of their lives. — Bernie Siegel

The changes we make in life often happen when we have a degree of certainty. However, the pain of our past failures and the fears of our peers often fuel our uncertainty. This inability to predict the future is why people find themselves stuck and unable to move forward. They don't want to feel the emotions of failure. They prefer to talk themselves into settling for an "okay" life, rather than the life they really want. However, failure is a matter of perspective! Is it not failure when you don't take a chance on the one thing you need? There is no happiness in regret, staying safe or settling for anything less than what you can have through action. — Shannon L. Alder

...when two people meet and get involved, they each bring their own history with them. How you bring these histories together provides the condition for the future of your relationship. A person who gives you too much of their "history" shows an inability to choose or prioritise their relationships.
Love professor - to Jennifer — Jennifer Cox

Old people love to give good advice; it compensates them for their inability to set a bad example. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

That's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws — Audrey Niffenegger

Sometimes it is very difficult to keep in mind the fact that the parents, too, have reasons for what they do
have reasons, locked in the depths of their personalities, for their inability to love, to understand, to give of themselves to their children. — Virginia Mae Axline

Inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But I realize now that the art of living in the present is not so much controlling time, it's losing track of time. This is most likely to happen when we surrender to something we love to do: not because it's a demand, or an emergency, or an inability to do anything else. Seeking out what we love so much that we lose track of time when we're doing it - that goes beyond Einstein's theory and puts us into his life. He loved his work so much that he had to be careful while shaving; otherwise, he cut himself when a spontaneous idea struck. That is a hint of the timeless Now. — Gloria Steinem

Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task. — Martha Stout

That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don't expect to get anything back, don't expect recognition for your efforts, don't expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are. — Paulo Coelho

He claimed that no act or thought that did not have love as its purpose was of God. Love was the secret of God's perfection. Man was imperfect only because of his inability to live life as a continuous act of love. — Michael Puttonen

It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women - that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture or love. — Bell Hooks

The middle path makes me wary ... But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement ... In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set ... We become missionaries for a position ... practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world. — Terry Tempest Williams

You cracked up. You were looking at me and laughing.
And I said, What? And you said, I love you.
And we were both completely shocked. Because it was a little premature, surely.
And you said it again, as though you were checking the flavor, and it tasted perfectly right. You said it again, softly, I love you; you were looking right into my heart. You said it again, almost shouting. And you were laughing and it was as though you were so happy you couldn't believe that someone had given you this good thing.
And it was partly that, and it was partly because you were thinking you'd had a premature decision, whereas guys your age were more generally associated with premature ejaculation. As well as inability to speak girl and commitment problems to anything other than games with buttons.
And the best part was when you said, You love me, too. And all I had to do was nod. Because it was true. — Fiona Wood

One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we'd love to see (again) for the first time. — Chuck Klosterman

Powerlessness is dangerous. For most of us, the inability to affect change is a desperate feeling. We need resilience and hope and a spirit that can carry us through the doubt and fear. We need to believe that we can effect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts. — Brene Brown

He wasn't stupid. He'd watched enough of his friends drop like flies when the fatal illness struck.

Now he was himself stricken; he showed all the Six Deadly Symptoms of a Man in Love:

1) Inability to think straight.

2) An alarming propensity to smile at the oddest moments.

3) Constant thoughts of the object of one's desire.

4) Absolutely no interest in other members of the opposite sex.

5) A startling sense of goodwill toward the world in general.

6) A perpetual state of sexual arousal. — Jillian Hunter

No work is stressful. It is your inability to manage your body, mind, and emotions that makes it stressful. — Jaggi Vasudev

An inability to meet the real demands of love is one of the essential characteristics of neurosis; the patients are dominated by the opposition of reality and fantasy. They will flee from what they long for most intensely in their fantasies if they encounter it in real life, and they are most likely to abandon themselves to fantasies when they no longer need to fear their realization. — Sigmund Freud

What the hell is wrong with me? This isn't the first time I've asked myself this question, in a multitude of situations. But this time specifically I'm referring to my inability to feel anything when being kissed by a man. Maybe I'm just too broken. Thant's the part that scares me the most. That I'm too broken to love. — Denise Grover Swank

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few. — Brene Brown

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death. — John Fowles

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language. — Ben Marcus

The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice - all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we are in need of a new evangelization - if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works ... this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life - he who is the Gospel personified. — Pope Benedict XVI

...you'd be surprised at how much of human fallacy comes from the inability to read each other. In other words, we're always reading in people what we want to see. Some of us want everyone to love us, some of us think that everyone hates us (and thus this gives us a valid reason to hate them). — Karina Halle

This matter of being able to establish Barbara's whereabouts for a specific number of hours brought at least limited relief from agonies of ignorance as to what her movements might be, with consequent inability to exercise control over her in however slight a degree; for love of that sort - the sort where the sensual element has been reduced to a minimum - must after all, largely if not entirely, resolve itself to the exercise of power: a fact of which Barbara was, of course, more aware than I. — Anthony Powell

It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so. — Nella Larsen

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. — David Foster Wallace

Over the years I've come to appreciate how animals enter our lives prepared to teach and far from being burdened by an inability to speak they have many different ways to communicate. It is up to us to listen more than hear, to look into more than past. — Nick Trout

This is because the greatest problem a mother has is not a lack of creativity, accomplishment, or skill, but her inability to love God and others as Jesus loves her (John 13:34). — Gloria Furman

I don't think Harry cares about being forgiven," Poppy said glumly.
"Of course he does. Men love to be forgiven. It makes us feel better about our inability to learn from our mistakes. — Lisa Kleypas

The French always make our sort happy because, like us, they know how to love, they're just as good at playing the accordion, and they've made a real art of their inability to bake proper bread. — Sasa Stanisic

Our souls aren't just compatible - they're perfectly attuned. I feel everything she feels. I understand things she never even has to say. I know that what she needs is exactly what I could give her, and what she's wishing she could give me is something I never even knew I needed. She understands me. She respects me. She astounds me. She predicts me. She's never once, since the second I met her, made me feel as if my inability to hear is even an inability at all. I can also tell just by looking at her that she's falling in love with me. — Colleen Hoover

Only when we try to love God will we see our utter inability to do so. And only when we understand that inability, will we begin to be in awe of His great love toward us. — Mike Donehey

The inability to love and accept yourself and your humanity is at the heart of many illnesses. To be loved and accepted, you must start by loving yourself. If you have traits that you consider unlovable, you must love them anyway ... it's a paradox. — Christiane Northrup

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. — Bell Hooks

We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit
the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness. — Alice McDermott

What do we really want to say to the world? Three main themes. The inability to find completion in our modern society, the inability to find completion within ourselves, and the new way to be human in what Christ offers us - His love and His perfect plan of redemption for us. — Jon Foreman

Your heart swallowed me like a well and I will never be able to climb out. I fell. I fell into your infinity. And my inability to free myself will doom your life. — Emalynne Wilder

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists. — Arundhati Roy

What like the apprehension of free forgiveness (and that apprehension must come in through a sight of the greatness of sin, and of inability to do any thing towards satisfaction), to engage the heart of a rebel to love his prince, and to submit to his laws? — John Bunyan

So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt. You changed my life so much more than this money will ever change yours.
Don't think of me too often. I don't want to think of you getting all maudlin. Just live well.
Just live.
Love,
Will — Jojo Moyes

She wonders sometimes if it's a sort of flaw or lack in her - the inability to lose herself in someone else ... she's never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling in love. — Diana Abu-Jaber

The coward's fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others' lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. - J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors — Sebastian Junger

The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles' inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm. — John Irving

The greatest tragedy in life is our inability to experience and express fascination for the people and events we love while in their presence. — Darrell Calkins

Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don't support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck. — James Altucher

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive. — James A. Baldwin

Fuck me and my inability to love him. — C.D. Reiss

He could not remember a time when she had not been in his life. Their first meeting seemed like an eternity away. 'Love at first sight' everyone said, and she often teased him about his inability to form coherent words when he gazed into her eyes, so profound was his love. They had never spent a day apart, and there had never been a day when he forgot to tell her how much she meant to him...Today was no exception... — Virginia Alison

I never asked you to earn me. I want only that you should need me. Your path is not one of merit. Bring the recurring desires of your mind to me, every time they emerge. They cannot shock me, for I willed them! Bring me your confusion, your fear, your craving, your anxiety, your inability to love the world, your hesitation to serve, your jealousy, all the deficiencies that defy your spiritual disciplines. — Sathya Sai Baba

She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words. — Shirley Jackson

People rely on intelligence to solve problems, and they are naturally baffled when comprehension proves impotent to effect emotional change. To the neocortical brain, rich in the power of abstractions, understanding makes all the difference, but it doesn't count for much in the neural systems that evolved before understanding existed. Ideas bounce like so many peas off the sturdy incomprehension of the limbic and reptilian brains. The dogged implicitness of emotional knowledge, its relentless unreasoning force, prevents logic from granting salvation just as it precludes self-help books from helping. The sheer volume and variety of self-help paraphernalia testify at once to the vastness of the appetite they address and their inability to satisfy it. (118) — Thomas Lewis

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university. — John Jakes

In different degrees, in every part of the town, men and women had been yearning for a reunion, not of the same kind for all, but for all alike ruled out. Most of them had longed intensely for an absent one, for the warmth of a body, for love, or merely a life that habit had endeared. Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship - letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these ... had desired a reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace. — Albert Camus

In retrospect, I'm embarrassed by how little effort on his part it took for me to come back or stay. I was so desperate for him to love me, to want me, to fight for me that I was literally grateful for any mere scrap of effort. I'd made so many excuses for his inability to treat me well that even the smallest gesture was amplified in my head. After years of this, I finally got my head out of my ass and realized that aside from feeling insecure and fragile about the state of my relationship all the time, we also wanted entirely different things out of life! — Greg Behrendt

Your value does not decrease based on someone's inability to see your worth. — Anonymous

Question of "Where We Begin" turns to be not only a formal question but also a question central to the attempt to make sense of things about which it is very difficult to make any sense - illness, death, despair, suicides, cruelty, the various troubles love can provoke, our inability to really know one another when we our inner selves are walled off by our bodies. — Kyle Minor

The #1 problem most patients face is the inability to love themselves — Bernie Siegel

Sobriety is love of health, or inability to eat much. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

As black people in a white-supremacist culture we have had a psychohistory of learning to utterly hide or repress our vulnerability in order to survive. When this survival strategy links with the overall cultural devaluation of vulnerability it makes sense that so many black folks have wrongly interpreted invulnerability as a sign of emotional strength. Maintaining this survival strategy when we no longer have to fear extreme violence at the hands of racist whites has damaged our emotional and intimate bonds. The inability to be vulnerable means that we are unable to feel. If we cannot feel we cannot truly emotionally connect with one another. We cannot know love. No wonder then that the lovelessness that abounds in our culture is even more intense among African-Americans. — Bell Hooks

Loneliness is not the perception of leading an isolated life, but it is an inability to get any caring eyes, especially when you want someone to care for you. It is also sense of being lost, even empty you from inside. When you burst into crying, you realise that the whole world is sleeping peacefully with both eyes and ears closed. — Bibhu Datta Rout

Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers -life after God- a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life - and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt. I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God. — Douglas Coupland

Nothing provokes more cynicism than a great love that was not shared, but nothing produces more modesty either; I was utterly surprised to feel loved. The truth is: a passion that fully preoccupies a man draws women to him when he least wants them. Even if he is sentimental and tender by nature, when he is obsessed with another he becomes indifferent and almost brutal. Because he is unhappy, he sometimes allows himself to be temped by the offer of affection. As soon as he has tasted this affection, he tires of it and does not disguise the fact. Without wishing to and without even realizing it, he plays the most appalling game. He becomes dangerous and conquers because he himself has been vanquished. This was the case with me. I had never been more convinced of my own inability to attract women, I had never felt less desire to attract them, and I had never received so much clear proof of devotion and love. — Andre Maurois

Such is my desire only to see the best parts of my partner and vice-versa that I must confess to being able to remember each time I have seen someone I was in love with fall over. I cannot help but be disappointed by such a shocking inability to perform such a simple task as staying upright. — Jon Richardson

And do you know why we have not the power to attain this Stoic ideal? It is because we refuse to believe in our power. Nay, of a surety, there is something else which plays a part: it is because we are in love with our vices; we uphold them and prefer to make excuses for them rather than shake them off. We mortals have been endowed with sufficient strength by nature, if only we use this strength, if only we concentrate our powers and rouse them all to help us or at least not to hinder us. The reason is unwillingness, the excuse, inability. — Seneca.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?' — Caroline Leavitt

To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession. — Denis De Rougemont

While everyone was screaming in italics, the babies themselves seem to have done just fine. Despite their inability to do almost anything on their own, infants are far more flexible than they get credit for: within a few obvious parameters - food, shelter, love - they are astonishingly adaptive. — Nicholas Day

What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction — Georg Brandes

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic. — Ernest Hemingway,