Quotes & Sayings About Love Encounters

There is little joy in those first moments of recognition- for the reality is that most encounters of such depth, most first glances of love come to nothing. And while the sincerity of that rare moment when your heart is bursting should be the signal to fling yourself on the ground in the path of this stranger, it's the depth of such sincerity that paralyses you, holds you back from the silence of phrases like "hello" and "good morning."
And as they pass, granting only single, torturous details like fingers upon the handle of an umbrella, or a hair pin bearing the weight of a twist, or a wool collar beaded with pearls of rain- there is only one thing you could ever say that would be true, that would make them stop walking and turn to face you.
But such a thing is unsayable. — Simon Van Booy

To try and rationalise all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naive; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He'd have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him? — K.J. Parker

This worship, given therefore to the Trinity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, above all accompanies and permeates the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy. But it must fill our churches also outside the timetable of Masses. Indeed, since the Eucharistic mystery was instituted out of love, and makes Christ sacramentally present, it is worthy of thanksgiving and worship. And this worship must be prominent in all our encounters with the Blessed Sacrament, both when we visit our churches and when the sacred species are taken to the sick and administered to them — Pope John Paul II

His father was an attorney in Paris. He met Sebastien's mother on a train to Amsterdam. There were no other seats. They were forced together and found they preferred it. — Simon Van Booy

Since I stopped drinking my love life has taken a really serious hit. Romantic encounters that seemed like a really good idea at three o'clock in the morning on the Lower East Side? Less so in sobriety. — Moby

Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives - the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we'd just as soon forget. — Sharon Salzberg

Deep within yourself, listen to your conscience which calls you to be pure ... a home is not warmed by the fire of pleasure which burns quickly like a pile of withered grass. Passing encounters are only a caricature of love; they injure hearts and mock God's plan. — Pope John Paul II

Florentino Ariza never had another
opportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chance
encounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and nine
months and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternal
fidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth. — Bell Hooks

If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance? — Simon Pegg

Love is an active construction, and choice, not just an encounter that happens by chance. — Masha Tupitsyn

For most writers, reading is also a very intense experience; they don't read so much as compete. The writer measure's himself against every text he encounters, imagining he could do it better or wishing he had thought of it first. The natural writer would almost always rather be reading, writing, or alone, except of course when he needs to come up for air (that is, for subject matter, food, sex, love, attention). He may be a selfish son of a bitch, he may seem to care more about his work than about the people in his life, he may be a social misfit, a freak, or a smooth operator, but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood. Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people. — Betsy Lerner

I'm sure a handful of people can relate to that experience of having some kind of romantic encounter - the event of love - which they just can't shake. They take it with them, despite their own desire, and it continually haunts them, and there's nothing to be done about it. That's a true rarity. — John Maus

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.
None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Life is always a series of encounters that demand you prove your love. — Shannon L. Alder

Maybe, if you can't get someone out of your head they were never meant to leave. Perhaps, they were meant to help change you into the person you have been waiting to become. — Shannon L. Alder

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb. — Tom Perrotta

It could be said that just about anyone we encounter is our neighbor, but it especially applies to those we would be least likely to love. — Leith Anderson

There is a time when every person who encounters Jesus, who believes Jesus is the Son of God, decides that they will spend their life following Him. Some people, like the Apostle Paul, make this decision the minute they meet Him, the minute they become a Christian. Others, like the Apostle Peter, endure years of half-hearted commitment and spiritual confusion before leaping in with all their passion. Still others may enjoy some benefits of God's love and grace without entering into the true joy of a marriage with their maker. — Donald Miller

Greet everyone you meet with a warm smile. No matter how busy you are, don't rush encounters with coworkers, family, and friends. Speak softly. Listen attentively. Act as if every conversation you have is the most important thing on your mind today. Look your children and your partner in the eyes when they talk to you. Stroke the cat, caress the dog. Lavish love on every living being you meet. See how different you feel at the end of the day ... — Sarah Ban Breathnach

There's really not much in life that's as violent or traumatic as an encounter with somebody who really surprises you and opens up that strange dynamic that's involved in romantic love. — John Maus

I love to talk about people I've met being an entertainer. All my encounters in life - I roll it all into an hour and 30 minutes. — Chris Tucker

We all are secret-keepers in our intimate relationships. We keep secrets from our partners about daily encounters, former lovers, true feelings about sex, friends, in-laws, finances, personal hopes, and worries about work, health, love, and life. It may be, in fact, that keeping these secrets makes all relationships possible. If our partners knew every thought, every nuance of our selves, our relationships would run the risk of succumbing from either constant turmoil or - perhaps worse - a tedious matter-of-factness devoid of surprises. Whatever their contribution to the maintenance of our unions, secrets also contribute to their collapse. — Diane Vaughan

Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color ... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are. — Mark Nepo

I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord's mercy which spurs us on to do our best. A small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties. Everyone needs to be touched by the comfort and attraction of God's saving love, which is mysteriously at work in each person, above and beyond their faults and failings. — Pope Francis

Ethan: "Abstaining definitely doesn't work."
Beth: "what do you suggest?"
Ethan: "We're obviously going to have to make love often, but keep the encounters from getting too intense." He sounded perfectly serious, like he really believed what he was saying. — Lucy Monroe

We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters. — Sharon Salzberg

Compassion has more to do with the attitude we bring to our encounters with other people than with any quantifiable metric of giving. — Sharon Salzberg

Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy. — Andrew Solomon

Whenever God reveals His nature in a new way, it is always for a purpose. He created you for a love relationship with Him. When He encounters you, He is allowing you to know Him by experience. Encounters with God are always an expression of God's love for you. Jesus said: "The one who has My commands and keeps them is the one who loves Me. And the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father. I also will love him and will reveal Myself to him" (John 14:21). — Henry T. Blackaby

In a way it's so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they're happy, they love him, everybody gets along. Sometimes he has to remind himself there's no dishonor in it. He hasn't told any lies, he doesn't exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied. — Ben Fountain

Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love's value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can 'surmount,' without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency. I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again. — Roland Barthes

I like playing that character who brings love to people, who puts people in a place where they're apt to encounter love. — Jane Fonda

I am a geek in terms of, I love 'Close Encounters' and I love 'Star Wars,' but other things ... 'Doctor Who,' I don't really care about at all, I couldn't give a fig about it. — Nick Frost

If you should encounter angry or unkind actions today, take a deep breath, reach deep within and greet the lack of love with love. — Iyanla Vanzant

That apple orchard is still in flower," I told myself. "Time has passed it by, leaving it behind in a moment that does not pass. An idea that seems as insane as the beauty of those flowering trees that will never bear fruit. But to believe in it gives a supreme meaning to our lives, our encounters, our loves."
Then I caught myself mentally addressing Kira, as on so many occasions during these last twenty years.
The truth is, I have never stopped walking beside her along an endless corridor lined with snow-clad boughts. — Andrei Makine

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Big, big, big smash for me. My birth of the love of cinema was born with 'Close Encounters' and '2001.' Those sci-fi movies I saw when I was a little kid. — Denis Villeneuve

When it comes to sexuality, romantic love plays a large part in feminine sexual scripts. Research suggests that women make sense of sexual encounters in terms of the amount of intimacy experienced; love becomes a rationale for sex. If i am in love, women often reason, sex is okay. Men more easily accept sex for its own sake, with no emotional strings necessarily attached. In this way, sexual scripts for men have involved more of an instrumental (sex for its own sake) approach, whereas for women it tends to be more expressive (sex involving emotional attachments). There is evidence to suggest that women are moving in the direction of sex as an end in itself without the normative constraints of an emotional relationship. By and large, however, women are still more likely than men to engage in sex as an act of love. Many scholars suggest that romance is one of the key ways that sexism is maintained in society. — Susan Shaw

In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure. — Alain Badiou

I've lived in New York long enough to understand why some people hate it here: the crowds, the noise, the traffic, the expense, the rents; the messed-up sidewalks and pothole-pocked streets; the weather that brings hurricanes named after girls that break your heart and take away everything.
It requires a certain kind of unconditional love to love living here. But New York repays you in time in memorable encounters, at the very least. Just remember: ask first, don't grab, be fair, say please and thank you- even if you don't get something back right away. You will. — Bill Hayes

Of all the fair resort of gentlemen
That every day with parle encounter me,
In thy opinion which is worthiest love? — William Shakespeare

Like many others who have gone into prisons and jails with us, Chuck and Carol Middlekauff demonstrate what our ministry is all about. We train Christian 'teammates' to share the good news and love of Christ with 'the least of these' so they can continue to do it with others they encounter as they go along. In this book, Carol has written the stories of some of those encounters so you can appreciate how easy it is to tell people about Jesus. It happens when you realize God does all the work, and all you have to do is show up. I hope you will be encouraged by reading the book and then join us soon for a Weekend of Champions to find out for yourself."
Bill Glass, retired NFL all-pro defensive end, evangelist, founder of Bill Glass Champions for Life prison ministries, and author of numerous books, including The Healing Power of a Father's Blessing and Blitzed by Blessings — Bill Glass

The longer I have lived with this new hope, the clearer it has become to me: our true hope in life doesn't spring from the feelings of our youth, lovely and fair though they are. Nor does it emerge from the objective possibilities of history, unlimited though they may be. Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: 'I live and you shall live also.' We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command - a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life. — Jurgen Moltmann

In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Grandfather used to call the rain 'the erotic ritual between heaven and Earth.' The rain represented the seeds sown in the Earth's womb by heaven, her roaring husband, to further life. Rainy encounters between heaven and Earth were sexual love on a cosmic scale. All of nature became involved. Clouds, heaven's body, were titillated by the storm. In turn, heaven caressed the Earth with heavy winds, which rushed toward their erotic climax, the tornado. The grasses that pop out of the Earth's warm center shortly after the rain are called the numberless children of Earth who will serve humankind's need for nourishment. The rainy season is the season of life. Yes, it had rained the night before. — Malidoma Patrice Some

On occasion when I am getting to know someone - when someone seeks to know me or, indeed, find in me the occasion for love - I am asked what my idea of love is, and I always founder. There are clearly those who have their ideas of love, who enter into their conversations, their letters, their initial encounters with an idea of love in mind. This is admirable in a way. And I am somewhat embarrassed by the fact that I have no answer, and that I cannot, in the moment of potential seduction, [have] an entrancing view of love to offer the one with whom I speak. ... One knows love somehow only when all one's ideas are destroyed, and this becoming unhinged from what one knows is the paradigmatic sign of love. — Judith Butler

Faith is above all a personal, intimate encounter with Jesus, and to experience [His] closeness, [His] friendship, [His] Love; only in this way does one learn to know [Him] ever more, and to love and follow [Him] ever more. May this happen to each one of us. — Pope Benedict XVI

When you meet anyone, treat the event as a holy encounter. It's through others that we either find or love our self. For you see, nothing is accomplished without others. When you eliminate the concept of separation from your thoughts and your behavior, you begin to feel your connection to everything and everyone. — Wayne Dyer

The idea that love is something magical, almost supernatural, in your heart, that has nothing to do with the day-to-day encounters with a real person
that understanding of love has probably created more unhappiness and ruined more marriages than just about anything.
Love is what happens between people living their lives together, becoming close through contact and actual partnership and it's what survives through difficulties and imperfections. An idealized, imagined, faraway person in your heart
that's not love. That's a daydream. — Misha Glouberman

The spiritual efficacy of all encounters is determined by the amount of personal ego that is in play. If two people meet and disagree fiercely about theological matters but agree, silently or otherwise, that God's love creates and sustains human love, and that whatever else may be said of God is subsidiary to this truth, then even out of what seems great friction there may emerge a peace that - though it may not end the dispute, though neither party may be "convinced" of the other's position - nevertheless enters and nourishes one's notion of, and relationship with, God. Without this radical openness, all arguments about God are not simply pointless but pernicious, for each person is in thrall to some lesser conception of ultimate truth and asserts not love but a lesson, not God but himself. — Christian Wiman

You are a creature of Divine Love connected at all times to Source. Divine Love is when you see God in everyone and everything you encounter. — Wayne Dyer

You assume that my previous sexual encounters were completely fulfilling, but you're wrong. You gave me what I've never had - love and sex together. You're the only one who has ever been my lover in the true sense. — Sylvain Reynard

It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child. — Maria Montessori

I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love - the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, back-ground music, moods, atmosphere, variations - forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs. — Anais Nin

A woman has to demonstrate in every moment to be thirty times better than a man, to gain trust and to be considered. So, she has to be tenacious, combattative but not aggressive, she has to love her work a lot and not let herself be discouraged by the daily discriminiation she encounters. — Dacia Maraini

Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A moment of grace. There rose up within me a profound sense of being loved. I felt "gathered together" and encircled by a Presence completely loving, as if I were enveloped by the music of a love song created just for me. It was not overwhelming or even emotional. Just a warm knowing that I was in God's loving embrace ... centered and unified there.
[Love]encounters cannot be analyzed, only shared. If you take a butterfly, Robert Frost said, and pin it down into a box, you no longer have a butterfly. — Sue Monk Kidd

I was never satisfied with casual encounters, I can't hide my need for two hearts that bleed with burning love. — Madonna Ciccone

The Song of Songs, the book of Ruth, and the cycle of stories associated with King David demonstrate that biblical perspectives on sexual desire and family ties remain much more complicated than is often thought. The appropriate expression of desire is not limited to marriage between a man and a woman, but can include the love of a son of a king for his charismatic ally, the love of rabbis and theologians for God, their "husband," and the love of a faithful Moabite for her Israelite mother-in-law. The nuclear family is also not idealized: Naomi, Ruth, and Obed are a family, bound together by their common love for one another, and, in the Song of Songs, the woman's mother supports her daughter's premarital encounters over the objections of her sons, who seek to control their sister's sexuality and are overruled. King David never even bothers to pursue marriage as commonly envisioned today. His — Jennifer Wright Knust

I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Encounter every situation with your total consciousness, without any guilt. Enjoy music, enjoy food, enjoy love - enjoy everything that is natural. — Rajneesh

Years later, my wife, Ilusion, woke me up to the realization that you can't just "dump" your whole species simply because you've had a few bad encounters with some of its members ... Intimacy's a greater goal to seek ... That true knowledge of intimacy within our own species will allow us to pass it along to interspecies relations. — Cesar Millan