Love During War Quotes & Sayings

My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day. — Robert Osborne

What is this peace, different from that which the world gives? This peace is the one your love gives ... a peace greater than suffering, not a peace without war, but a peace in spite of war, during war, above war, the peace of the soul, having, through love, its whole life in heaven and thus enjoying the peace of heaven in spite of everything which may happen on earth around it and against it. - from Michel Carrouges, Soldier of the Spirit — Charles De Foucauld

It didn't matter.
Carson wasn't the one for me. He wasn't even the one for right now. My life would hopefully have its great love story but this wasn't it. It would happen in D.C. in the next four years or it would happen in Africa, if I ever got there, or in Sienna or, for all I knew, Kentucky or Timbuktu.
Life was long.
And people only really had great love affairs in high school in the movies. And maybe during world wars. But this was not a movie and not a war, even if it sometimes felt that way. It was only high school and it was almost over with anyway. — Tara Altebrando

England Their England by AG Macdonell which was written in the thirties and is about a young Scotsman who's got shell shocked during the First World War... I love it. — Ian Hislop

From the accession of Henry the Seventh to the breaking out of the civil wars, England enjoyed much greater exemption from war, foreign and domestic, than for a long period before, and during the controversy between the houses of York and Lancaster. These years of peace were favorable to commerce and the arts. Commerce and the arts augmented general and individual knowledge; and knowledge is the only fountain, both of the love and the principles of human liberty. — Daniel Webster

I urge you all today, especially today during these times of chaos and war, to love yourself without reservations and to love each other without restraint. Unless you're into leather. — Margaret Cho

No, I don't live in heartache. I don't cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And - like it or not - I still think about her every single day. — Harlan Coben

He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda . and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did. — Ernest Hemingway,

There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn't exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs - dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The most compassionate and peaceful thing you can do for yourself and others is to let go of the past, let go of the anger, let go of trying to hurt people that wronged you. There are thousands of people dying from cancer that wish they had someone to care about them and be with them during their final days. There are children being sold into sex trafficking and are hoping someone would rescue them. There are homeless people that wish they had something warm to wear or eat. There is an entire species being wiped out because not enough people care about our oceans. Today, remember that there is someone praying for the very things you take for granted. Spend your effort where God needs you to be
on the front lines of the war on earth, not on the battlefields of the past. — Shannon L. Alder

My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was an ability to let my emotions be stirred by only one thing - my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover's happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I didn't think I would ever meet a noble who wasn't corrupt. Now that I have, I find that I prefer them when they're greedy bastards. (Brom to Eragon) — Christopher Paolini

"I am not much of a mathematician," said the cigarette, "but I can add to a man's nervous troubles, I can subtract from his physical energy, I can multiply his aches and pains, I can divide his mental powers, I take interest from his work, and discount his chances for success." — David Starr Jordan

It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men. — Carl Sagan

To who? Your god may love soul mates but man does not. Such a couple is vulnerable, particularly if they are fool enough to let the world see how shiny and happy they are. Their risk rises tenfold during times of war. There are two courses a couple in such circumstances can chart: go deep into the country and hide as far from humanity as possible, hoping like hell nobody finds them. Because the world will tear them apart." He is wrong. He knows nothing of soul mates. — Karen Marie Moning

Giveaway T-shirts stretched over monstrous beer bellies. Puffy NFL jackets and porky jowls. Granted, I'm in a bowling alley,but the differences between Americans and Parisians are shocking.I'm ashamed to see my country the way the French must see us. Couldn't these people have at least brushed their hair before leaving their houses?
"I need a licorice rope," Cherrie announces. She marches toward the snack stand,and all I can think is these people are your future.
The thought makes me a little happier.
When she comes back,I inform her that just one bite of her Red Dye #40-infused snack could kill my brother. "God, morbid," she says. Which makes me think of St. Clair again.Because when I told him the same thing three months ago,instead of accusing me of morbidity,he asked with genuine curiosity, "Why?"
Which is the polite thing to do when someone offers you such an interesting piece of conversation. — Stephanie Perkins

We humans have existed in our present form for about a hundred thousand years. I believe that if during this time the human mind had been primarily controlled by anger and hatred, our overall population would have decreased. But today, despite all our wars, we find that the human population is greater than ever. This clearly indicates to me that love and compassion predominate in the world. And this is why unpleasant events are "news"; compassionate activities are so much a part of daily life that they are taken for granted and , therefore, largely ignored. — Dalai Lama

My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake. — Mark Slouka

That could also be because at one point during the film, our hands found each other. And when I felt Michael's middle finger caress the inside of my palm, it sent a tickle up my spine, and the fingers of my right hand were soon exploring his left hand, and we each took turns tracing the contours of the other's hands. — Zack Love

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire. — Michael Ondaatje

The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come into our own realm as free and intelligent beings. — Thomas Merton

During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema. — Francois Truffaut

Cecily, Cecily. Foolish girl, to think herself enamored with a beast. She could have no conception of Luke's animal side. There were times during the war he'd been stripped down to it - become a base, feral creature that knew only hunger, sweat and the smells of blood and fear.
She was dreaming after a myth: a gentleman who dallied as a noble beast, rescuing damsels in some enchanted forest. With Luke, she would get a beast wearing the clothes of a man. An uncivilized creature who'd lost all enjoyment in balls and parlor games, who'd forgotten the words to all her trite little songs of green meadows and shepherds and love.
Enjoy your fantasy world, Cecily. Let me visit you there, from time to time.
-Luke's thoughts — Tessa Dare

Some mediocre ladies in influential positions are usually embarrassed by an unusual book and so prefer the old familiar stuff which doesn't embarrass them and also doesn't give the child one slight inkling of beauty and reality. This is most discouraging to a creative writer, like you, and also to a hardworking and devoted editor like me. I love most of my editor colleagues but I must confess that I get a little depressed and sad when some of their neat little items about a little girl in old Newburyport during the War of 1812 gets [sic] adopted by a Reading Circle. — Leonard S. Marcus

You should ask the president what he thinks about America, — Scott Walker

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

In winter I like sprawling novels, full of conflict and intrigue, and during the bleakest, coldest days of December I holed up with Nicola Griffith 's Hild, a book of love and sex and war and religious upheaval, and I recommend it even over the warmest pair of Sorels. — Maud Newton

People are more likely to fall intensely in love when they are anxious and their self-esteem is lowest.... Feeling inadequate, unhappy, and empty are virtual prerequisites for falling and staying desperately in love; at least temporarily, the ecstasy of desire seems to cure everything that ails you. There is a connection between aversive states of mind -- loneliness, shame, even grief and horror -- and a propensity to feel overwhelming passion; this is one reason why romances blossom in times of war or natural disasters, as well as during the private disasters of our everyday lives. — Jeanne Safer

I don't necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities. — Philip Roth

I'm trying to carry on my dad's legacy, and it is tough. — Bindi Irwin

Learning to be flexible in values takes a very long time ... Of course I felt a little uncomfortable during questioning the concept of God, but then reading about the history and evolution of Gods. There were many different Gods: the God of war, the God of peace, the God of love, which was more like the people that invented them. They behaved, they got angry, they made sacrifices, they created floods when they didn't like the way things are going. This didn't come through as superior intelligence. — Jacque Fresco

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive. — Guy Sajer

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting"


I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.

I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.

I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other. — Kevin C. Powers

I had created a happy world of make-believe around me during the long years of loneliness, a world of beauty and love. It had helped me to survive, this lovely world that was to be mine when the war was over. — Gerda Weissmann Klein

During times of war.
I want to say:
I only love you,
And I cling you,
Like the peel clings to a pomegranate,
Like the tear clings to the eye,
Like the knife clings to the wound. — Nizar Qabbani

Like pleasure, beauty should be savored and enjoyed — P.C. Cast

Now everything was changed. She walked about with cautious, anxious steps, staring constantly at the ground, on the lookout for things that crept and crawled. Bushes were dangerous, and so were sea grass and rain water. There were little animals everywhere. They could turn up between the covers of a book, flattened and dead, for the fact is that creeping animals, tattered animals, and dead animals are with us all our lives, from beginning to end. Grandmother tried to discuss this with her, to no avail. Irrational terror is so hard to deal with. [p. 136] — Tove Jansson

Competition is good for consumers for the simple reason that it compels producers to offer better deals - lower prices, better quality, new products, and more choice. — John Vickers

The one consistent policy running through this [Clinton] administration is the love it has lavished on Marxists
food aid for North Korea, diplomatic recognition of the Hanoi regime, chronic kowtowing to Beijing and now doing Castro's dirty work. How can the Clinton gang
which carried the Viet Cong flag during anti-war demonstrations and decorated their dorm rooms with pictures of Che Guevara
not feel contempt for people who insist, with every fiber of their being, that communism is mankind's mortal enemy? — Don Feder

Katy, that the whole world can be involved in this madness we call war, and all the while the flowers and the bees and the seasons keep on doing what they must, wise but never weary in their wait for humanity to come to its senses and remember the beauty of life? It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?) Anyway, — Kate Morton