Love Is Being Together Quotes & Sayings

Lasting love is more a matter of learning to look outward at the world together than looking longingly eye-to-eye. Love Conditionally. Healthy, lasting love is conditional, not unconditional. No one, including you, is love-worthy if she or he does not behave lovingly. Love is something you earn, not something you deserve. Worry more about being love-worthy than about your own self-worth. — Paul Pearsall

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use. — Lao-Tzu

The Temperature is Rising
The heartbeat quickens my breath is controlled,my senses are illuminated like a mother to her young. This feeling I have I've know it before, when the gates are opened I'll remember the beginning. Awaiting, dreaming imagining the endless possibilities of moments together as I give into my desires. My body reacts it has a mind of its own leaving little clues yet I continue on.
Poised and professional I cross my origin the passion that awaits it stirs like a simmer. The sweet aroma a treat being made just for him I know he will like, the hunger in his eyes his mouth soft and strong it only took me a moment as he continued to look on. I didn't even recognize my sound as I was in a sphere all alone I hoped and imagined it would be but my mind was left in awe like sweet chocolate after a meal. — M.I. Ghostwriter

The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude. — Robert Musil

Brokeback Mountain is a sad love story about two people who can't be together, and the reason that they can't be together is because being gay is a stigmatized thing. It would be interesting to have the same movie in which the two guys weren't in the closet and there was no shame about them being gay and they couldn't be together for other reasons. I still feel like we're a long way from that happening. — Wesley Morris

As if the parents we were born to weren't always a matter of happenstance: an elbow jostled at a bar, a muscular hand smoothing the hair away from a blue-shadowed eye, a quick decision that this girl looks hot or that guy seems safe. We are never guaranteed that the people who fit together so deliciously in the heat of a moment can building a lasting love. And it is love, the breadth and force of being wholly, unabashedly loved - not just having two parents who look like the wax figures on a wedding cake - that affirms and redeems us. Poverty alone doesn't always spark violence. And a two-parent home isn't always the antidote. The urge to obliterate is as dark and unknowable as the hollows of our bones. — Laura Bogart

Y-naga: "That's the thing ... It's like trying to find a guy who's a kid at heart but still a responsible adult, so he can be counted on when I find myself in a pinch, somebody who's a little wild at times but normally lets me have my way even when I'm being selfish and just says, "well, if you insist," a guy who's not too full of himself but understands what clothes suit his body type best ... "
S-hara: "What I'm saying is the pretty ones are stupid! The ones who have it all together are all so, so stubborn that they never do things my way! — Fumi Yoshinaga

One of my favorite prayers is God, how can I love on you today? As I sit in silence of those words, sometimes I'll feel compelled to sing or read a passage of Scripture, or I'll be reminded of someone with a need I can meet; but on some of the most meaningful days, God simply says, just be with me. I sit in the silence and enjoy stillness with God. No agenda. No words. No words. No challenge. No correction or instruction. Just being together. In those moments, I'm reminded that the heart of faith is simply being with God. I sense God's love. Some of my best friendships reach a level at which we can sit together without having to say anything and still enjoy each other's presence. The same is true for God, and I love to experience that depth of love in my relationship with Christ. -Hungry for God — Margaret Feinberg

The Whole World:
My favorite thing
is being your lap
while we sit there
together & love
the whole world. — Brian Andreas

The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance or your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.
That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will then either separate - in love - or move ever more deeply into the Now together - into Being. Can it be that simple? Yes, it is that simple. — Eckhart Tolle

Take it from me, anyone who lives with you is occasionally going to wonder who your liver might taste, and not because they are hungry. It comes with being a teenager - you inspire violence in the hearts of those who love you. It mostly goes away when you hit twenty. — Patricia Briggs

There is no such thing as the perfect relationship. You can however, create a relationship which is perfect. Perfection comes from your commitment to being a teacher and a student. Being as curious and playful as children. Having the maturity of an adult, and being a friend, partner, and lover. Perfection often comes from imperfection. So, embrace the challenges and learn to grow together, not apart ... . — James A. Murphy

True love, and what it is, and how do you know what it is. Is it just chemistry, or is it years and years of commitment and being together and hanging in there building a history? And how do you find both? — Patricia Heaton

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. — Sylvia Plath

It is only when you begin to understand that if you and I are truly in love, if I go to the place in me that is love and you to the place in you that is love we are 'together' in Love. We start to understand that what love means is that we are sharing a common state together. That state exists in you and it exists in me. — Ram Dass

If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another; unchastity is not improved by adding perjury. The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made. — C.S. Lewis

During the spring break I read a book called Everlasting. It was a really great book to read. It was about how a girl named Ivy and a boy named Triston were madly in loved but they couldn't be together. Triston had died but he came back to life as another person. But, the problem was that the person that he become was accused as a murderer. So he was being chased. But, even though he was being chased they figured things out and they were together forever. I chose to read this book because when I first started reading it i really liked it. I liked this book a lot because it talked about romance and how they didn't give up. They overcame the difficulties that came before them. What I didn't really like about this book is that many people came in between the love that Ivy and Triston had. — Elizabeth Chandler

Being in love means you are completely broken, then put back together. The one piece that was yours is beating in your lover's breast. She says the same thing about hers. — Jason Molina

Marriage has become a battlefield where two persons are fighting for supremacy. Of course, the man has his own way: rough and more primitive. The woman has her own way: feminine, softer, a little more civilized, more subdued. But the situation is the same. Now psychologists are talking about marriage as an intimate enmity. And that's what it has proved to be. Two enemies are living together pretending to be in love, expecting the other to give love; and the same is being expected by the other. Nobody is ready to give - nobody has it. How can you give love if you don't have it? — Rajneesh

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. — Louis De Bernieres

It is essential to love that it be, not a focus of two persons on each other, but of two persons on the same thing external to them both.

Although it has always been on offer, God's love cannot really be experienced unless or until one works side by side with him at transforming the world--unless or until one has confronted real affliction with him ("suffer[ed] with him,' Paul says in Romans 8:17) while tackling the task of remodeling the world (in what Paul calls, again in Romans 8:17, being "joint-heirs with Christ").

Love, in other words, has to be understood as more than a mere emotion; it is a way of being together in the world or, better, a way of working together to change the world.

What begins as a kind of instrumentality--I hope only to be a toll in God's hands--eventually becomes a very real partnership, ideally bound by covenant. — Joseph M. Spencer

Wherefore it is fitting that ye also should run together in accordance with the will of the bishop who by God's appointment [515] rules over you. Which thing ye indeed of yourselves do, being instructed by the Spirit. For your justly-renowned presbytery, being worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp. Thus, being joined together in concord and harmonious love, of which Jesus Christ is the Captain and Guardian, do ye, man by man, become but one choir; so that, agreeing together in concord, and obtaining [516] a perfect unity with God, ye may indeed be one in harmonious feeling with God the Father, and His beloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord. For, says He, "Grant unto them, Holy Father, that as I and Thou are one, they also may be one in us." [517] It is therefore profitable that you, being joined together with God in an unblameable unity, should be the followers of the example of Christ, of whom also ye are members. [515] — Ignatius Of Antioch

To love is not to possess,
To own or imprison,
Nor to lose one's self in another.
Love is to join and separate,
To walk alone and together,
To find a laughing freedom
That lonely isolation does not permit.
It is finally to be able
To be who we really are
No longer clinging in childish dependency
Nor docilely living separate lives in silence,
It is to be perfectly one's self
And perfectly joined in permanent commitment
To another--and to one's inner self.
Love only endures when it moves like waves,
Receding and returning gently or passionately,
Or moving lovingly like the tide
In the moon's own predictable harmony,
Because finally, despite a child's scars
Or an adult's deepest wounds,
They are openly free to be
Who they really are--and always secretly were,
In the very core of their being
Where true and lasting love can alone abide. — James Kavanaugh

When I met you - somehow you healed me. From the inside out, the outside in. We conquered fears together, we learned, we laughed, and we loved. I swear, you caused my heart to soar more in the past few months than it has in my entire existence. My heart is whole because you chose to share yours with me, and it's for that reason that I get down on not one, but both knees ... " I knelt in front of her and gripped her hand. "And say thank you. Thank you for saving my life, thank you for loving me enough to treasure your own, and thank you for being my strength when I had none. I'd like to think our hearts are joined - forever entwined - but considering that's not technically a legal joining, I have a question for you
Marry me? Make me the happiest man alive." I opened the box revealing my mom's ring. — Rachel Van Dyken

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. — Robert Penn Warren

The climate crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. From not only the warming of the earth with higher global temperatures, but also from strengthening storms and expanding droughts to melting ice and rising seas, the costs of carbon pollution are already being felt by governments, corporations, taxpayers and families around the world. The climate crisis will affect everything that we love and alter the course of our future. Now, more than ever, we must come together to solve this global crisis. We must act decisively, rise to the occasion and solve this monumental challenge. — Al Gore

What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others
among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end
who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn
whom we must seek all our lives long
headlong and homesick
until the end? — Robert Nathan

Martin Swinger is one of those rare singer-songwriters who excels at everything: singing, songwriting, guitar-playing, and being so present with his humor, tenderness, and wild mind that his performances are also deep conversations, soul to soul and heart to heart, about the quirks, surprises, and love that brings us most alive. His songs, ranging from the little plastic parts that hold the world together, to what enlightenment comes from Buddha and Betty Boop falling in love, are whimsically and wisely original and enduring. — Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

They don't really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation. The sad truth about divorce is that it's hard to teach your kids about life unless you are living life with them: eating together, doing homework, watching Little League, driving them around endlessly, being bored with nothing to do, letting them listen while you do business, while you negotiate love and the frustrations and complications and rewards of living day in and out with your wife. Through this, they see how adults handle responsibility, honesty, commitment, jealousy, anger, professional pressures, and social interactions. Kids learn from whoever is around them the most. — Rob Lowe

Love is a devoted madness while marriage is a responsibility. But then it is possible to be devotedly mad and responsible at the same time, yes it is. And so this is how we should begin to see marriage: as it is, for what it is! Marriage needs to cease being an eternal ideal with the predestined ending of death! We must allow it to be and to appear as what it is! Perhaps if we approach marriage with eyes open to the reality of the nature of it, we will stop failing at it! We fail at it because we think of it as something it is not! We are romanced by an ideal that is not in touch with reality and that's why when we begin to discover the reality of it, we see ourselves as failures! It is a wild and blessed thing to want to spend the rest of your adult life with one person, growing and changing together, while stepping deeper into the depths of love; notwithstanding, we must understand that we may not get it "right" the first time. — C. JoyBell C.

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction. — Tahereh Mafi

Be quiet, pain and sorrow!
Let me find a remedy. I have to live,
as once dead there is no memory. And I want
to see my love and be with her. And I
want to remember our being together. — Omar Khayyam

From what I've been able to figure out, all of us are here together and we need one another. We must celebrate each other's differences. Learning to ask for help is as important as learning the value of helping other people. I believe all the people in my life have been there for a reason, and I hope I have been in theirs for a reason as well. It's taken me a while, but I feel truly blessed. After all is said and done, I love life, I love people, and I love being me. — Maureen McCormick

I love making films. I'm happiest when I'm doing it. For me, the fear is not being able to make the next thing and not being able, as a woman filmmaker and as a filmmaker of color, to put together the resources to make another thing. — Ava DuVernay

We see them as they cannot, will not, see each other
we see his heart in the way he looks at her; we see her soul calling out for his every touch. It would be so easy if they could only see inside each other as we can.
And yet, there is beauty in the way they find each other: slowly, in a fragile dance of sidelong glances and accidental touches. To see them come together, souls binding without knowing each other as we do, without being certain of what the other's heart holds, is to learn something new ...
Faith. — Amie Kaufman

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other's imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes - hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways - and that's okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we're all these incredibly fragile beings. — Alain De Botton

And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together - year after year - for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable' - is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner - or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom - or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room - waiting to be discovered! — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Marriage is foremost a vocation. Two people are called together to fulfill a mission that God has given them. Marriage is a spiritual reality. That is to say, a man and a woman come together for life, not just because they experience deep love for each other, but because they believe that God loves each of them with an infinite love and has called them to each other to be living witnesses of that love. To love is to embody God's infinite love in a faithful communion with another human being. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

We must think of ourselves as a tribe - as an international community that has come together with a common purpose of being initiated into the process.

We all have to do it together. There is a link that happens - where THE growth, my growth, depends on the others' growth around us.

We can no longer take these steps by ourselves. We have created a synergistic community. We must take a step towards knowledge together. — Alberto Villoldo

O'Brien: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
Winston: By making him suffer.
O'Brien: Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. — George Orwell

You went away. Cause you said that you can't stand me. So I went away. I was sure that you can't stand me. Well I don't think we have to be like this forever. Is there more to life than love and being together? — Tegan Quin

Being a troll, he loved the earth. A troll's love for the earth is a peculiar thing - it is something like the way you and I love our parents and our dogs and our favorite novels and the stuffed rabbits we have had since we were in our cradles and the very best thing we have ever done with our own two hands, all smashed up together in a rough, enormous ball of feeling the size of a planet. — Catherynne M Valente

Play is a universal language. It gives a sense of joy in being alive. It is one of the healthiest things we have in our culture. When we play, we give a gift of joy to another. Happy and joyous family times are a unifying force. They increase closeness and positive feelings. They increase loyalty to the family team. Everyone relaxes and feels more alive. Love just happens when you're having fun together! — Louise Hart

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful. — Anthony Esolen

You deserve so much better" are the words of advice I give you as we enjoy a meal together, hoping you realize I am the better choice of whom I speak of. I don't understand why you even entertain these clowns who don't understand your worth as I sit here loving you until it hurts. Being this close to you is a curse because you only view me as a friend and nothing more, but I figured if I play the part then maybe we could one day be something more. "Friend Zone" from Crucified for 33 Thoughts — Jackson Saint-Louis

The central issue in the marriage is not well-being or happiness. It is, as this book has tried to demonstrate, salvation. Marriage involves not only a man and a woman who happily love each other and raise offspring together, but rather two people who are trying to individuate, to fond their soul's salvation. — Adolf Guggenbhuhl-Craig

It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. — John Stuart Mill

One way to tell if you're really comfortable with a person is if you can be quiet together sometimes and not feel awkward. If you don't feel obligated to say something brilliant or funny or surprising or cool. You can just be together. You can just be. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

I still love being creative. I still love the aspects of working together with great, talented people. But it's a weird dichotomy; I'm being blessed with more opportunities, but I'm going to be taking less of them. — Sandra Bullock

It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded. — Edna O'Brien

To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling. We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature. In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once. — Susan Griffin

Love is being stupid together. — Paul Valery

We hold in our hands a key to peace on earth, yet it has been overlooked. It is the near-death experience. It must be examined closely by every living human being. The near-death experience offers one common experience, and only one. It is time for the world to embrace this reality and come together in love. — April Michelle Lewis

It isn't about being at the same school or the same town or even the same room. It's about being together. Love is a choice you make. — Kristin Hannah

We've seen how beautiful it can be to follow Jesus into this new way of being human. But one of the things I love most about Jesus is how much He loves humanity in its brokenness. If He was surrounded by fractured people then, why would we expect it to be any different now? I actually think it is a larger mistake when we Christians attempt to pretend that our lives are more together than they really are in order to "manage our image" before the broader culture. Come look at our perfect church and our perfect family. And if you join us, maybe one day you, too, can have a perfect life! That kind of spin is a breeding ground for disappointment. — Jonathan Martin

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this 'central experience is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together ... they are one with each other by being one with themselves. — Erich Fromm

What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes."
"You like to overstate."
"I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I'm finished forever. — Don DeLillo

A student to teacher: "I am so alone; I don't know what to do?" Teacher: "Do not worry about being alone, we always come alone and go alone. In a very sweet accident, we meet others who are alone and start to be part of them in various forms of relationships such as friends, husband, wife, mother, father, sister and so on. So, life is about sharing a moment together, not thinking as if you are alone. — Santosh Kalwar

I love being in the business I'm in-I do love being a part of a group of people that work well together. I love it when there's a connection. — Mary Steenburgen

People falling in love for one reason may fall out of love due to another reason. However, if faith or trust is the basis of love, it does not break easily. Often people use all their reasoning to understand each other and even live together for years to satisfy themselves that they are in love. However, marriages based on such logical love, the love based on reason, do not last long. Quite to the contrary, marriages where the partners do not even know each other, survive for life - being based on mutual trust and faith. — Awdhesh Singh

Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. — Plato

The love of God. The mercy of God. The judgment of God. You take the shoes off your feet and stand as you would before a mountain or at the edge of the sea. But the friendship of God? It is not something God does. It is something Abraham and God, or Moses and God, do together. Not even God can be a friend all by himself apparently. You see Abraham, say, not standing at all but sitting down, loosening his prayer shawl, trimming the end off his cigar. He is not being Creature for the moment, and God is not being Creator. There is no agenda. They are simply being together, the two of them, and being themselves. — Frederick Buechner

Thank you, Ocean," I said to the sea. "Thank you for rolling relentlessly around the world and showing us how everything's connected. Thank you, Stars," I said looking up. "For shining down from such a distance. You show us how small we are and yet how magnificent it is to be alive. Thank you, Earth, for holding everything all together and giving us a place to walk, and sleep, and love." I squeezed Josh's hand. "And thank you, Josh, for being earth and water and stardust and for coming to me in the uniqueness of yourself. — Catou Martine

Haven't you seen and heard that every word I seed for you is a feeling, and every thought I bloom bears a meaning?
Rivers of words, blending together for the same course, the action of my being:
my universe, your beauty. — Soar

Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration. — Anais Nin

My dear little big Marianne,
... I hope that you will grow up to be a healthy, happy and strong human being. I hope you will experience the most beautiful things the world has to give... And then you must have children... And think of our evenings of discussion in bed, about all the important things of life... And think of our beautiful three weeks at the seashore - of the sunrise, and when we walked barefoot along the beach from Bansin to Uckeritz, and when I pushed you before me on the rubber float, and when we read books together. We had so many beautiful things together, my child, and you must experience them all over again, and much more besides... And be happy as often as you can - every day is precious.
My love for you shall accompany you your whole life long.

(From Rose Schlosinger to her daughter, 1943) — Karen Payne

If you told me today our being together would result in heartbreak I would still choose to be with you because I believe that truly living life is in the experiences not the outcomes. — Kathryn Perez

The gift of love is in the simplest and utter joy of just being with the other. In coming alive to the present moment, together. In recognizing and being overwhelmingly grateful that among countless other possibilities that the vastness of life throws, the moment was possible. The impatience of love, is to desire a million such moments stretching forever. Small. Beautiful. Profound. Fragile. Floating away like flowers on the flowing brook. How foolish we are sometimes to miss the gift of the present, in our desire to imprison the future? — Srividya Srinivasan

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

Cope's bot can string together notes that weave in and out with the power of Beethoven or the finesse of Mozart. That a machine can produce things of such beauty is threatening to many in the music community. "If you've spent a good portion of your life being in love with these dead composers and along comes some twerp who claims to have this piece of software that can move you in the same way, suddenly you're asking yourself, 'What's happened here?'" Cope says. "I'm messing with some very powerful relationships. — Christopher Steiner

It's hard to accept that you've missed out on a person, that all you'll ever know of them are pieced-together stories. It's not like missing out on a party or a concert-those are temporary experiences, and you'll have other opportunities. But this is permanent. It's like being robbed of something valuable you never had the privilege to own. — Katie Kacvinsky

I've always known we were two puzzle pieces that fit together in a hollow that is our pain. There was a time when I was certain we were too damaged not to destroy each other. Now I think we are saving each other. — Lisa Renee Jones

There are hundreds of reasons for Daniel and me
to be impossible. History has not been kind
to two boys who love each other like we do.
But putting that aside. And not even considering
the fact that a hundred and fifty years ago,
his family was in a small town in Russia
and my family was in a similarly small town
in Ireland- I can't imagine they could have
imagined us here, together. Forgetting our gender,
ignoring all the strange roads that led to us
being in the same time and place, there is still
the simple impossibility of love. That all of our
contradicting securities and insecurities,
interests and disinterests, beliefs and doubts,
could somehow translate into this common
uncommon affection should be as impossible
as walking to the moon. But instead, I love him. — David Levithan

Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be. — Margaret Atwood

You have to be a bit of a dreamer to imagine a world where love trumps hate--but I don't think being a dreamer is all that bad. Joel prophesied that God would "pour out [His] Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions" (Joel 2:28). I'm an old man, and this is one of my dreams: that my descendants will one day live in a land where people are quick to confess their wrongdoing and forgive the wrongdoing of others and are eager to build something beautiful together. — John M. Perkins

I think in the heart of every human being there burns an ember of hope that warmly entices us to believe everything will eventually come together into one perfect day, and that potentially the hours in this day will stretch on indefinitely. And so we live our lives in hopeful anticipation, dreaming and praying to reach this wondrous day, while in the process we miss out on the anxious affair that life truly is. Life is not perfection; it is everything else. We must taste and experience heartaches and trials in order to feel the genuine joy that comes from enduring them well. We then move on, wiser and more capable of charity - this being pure love and the reason for life's trials altogether. — Richelle E. Goodrich

All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunegonde, if you hadn't been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn't traveled across America on foot, if you hadn't given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn't lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn't be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. - That is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden. — Voltaire

One of the things I love about books is being able to define and condense certain portions of a character's life into chapters. It's intriguing, because you can't do this with real life. You can't just end a chapter, then skip the things you don't want to live through, only to open it up to a chapter that better suits your mood. Life can't be divided into chapters ... only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any time lapses or blank pages or chapter breaks because no matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your fucking breath.
I need one of those chapter breaks. I just want to catch my breath, but I have no idea how. — Colleen Hoover

I glance over at Gabe. Maybe I was wrong about me. About being for no one. I don't know what the future holds. My dad is right - there are no guarantees. None. But I pick up Gabe's hand and lace our fingers together, and that's enough in this moment.

We look out at the water, and that is more than enough for now. — Emma Mills

....The important thing is not where we die but how we live. Being native to a place is a labor of love and a life's work. It means stitching your life to that of a place with a thread spun from mindfulness, attentiveness, husbandry, pilgrimage, and witness. Stories knit these components of practice together. Flung outward, they clothe our relationships; flung inward, they map the soul. Stories enable us to enter and dwell attentively in a place; they enable us to travel and return, then eventually to leave for good. We need stories to stay alive spiritually: without them we would all turn into hungry ghosts. Stories are the only things we can take with us out of this world. They are the wings that bear us up or the chains that drag us down. In the end, it is stories that enable us to die. — John Tallmadge

I simply followed (my teacher's) instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared
myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Religion and anger has gone together a lot, historically. My father, being very religious and angry, was trying to reconcile the ideas of love and forgiveness with damage in his own heart. We historically create God in the image of someone who will redeem us, or someone who has damaged us. A lot of my imaginations of God was a projection of my own damage because of my father. God is good but he has a lot of expectations, of which I have failed
just like my dad. But I don't think it's truthful to create God as a projection of either our damage or our altruism. — William P. Young

All love is is two people being stupid together. — Brian Armstrong

What we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people. — Marcel Proust

I don't deny that impulse drew us together, but while physical gratification began and ended it for you, in making love, dumbo here - - ' she jerked a thumb at her chest ' - was also demonstrating that she cared.'
His tongue moistened his lips. 'You're very up-front, aren't you?'
'You mean none of your other rejects have ever looked you in the eye and complained?' Sian queried. She might have made things easy last night, but she refused to make anything easy for him now. 'I suppose you'd prefer it if I shrugged my shoulders, muttered something about it being nice while it lasted, and filed the experience away under lessons learned? Well, sorry, but for me, and for most women if they're honest, going to bed with someone is a darn sight more complicated than that! — Elizabeth Oldfield

In his person, life, death and resurrection, Jesus Christ is the 'form of God'. As presented in the New Testament writings, the words, actions and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the 'style' of unconditional love. Love is always beautiful, because it expresses the self-diffusiveness of being, and so is touched by being's radiance, the pulchrum. But the unconditional, gracious, sacrificial love of Jesus Christ expresses not just the mystery of being - finite being - but the mystery of the Source of being, the transcendent communion of love which we call the Trinity.25 Thus through the Gestalt Christi, the love which God is shines through to the world. This is Balthasar's basic intuition. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

I think the reason why twentysomethings are so fixated on age is because we feel a pressure to be a certain way at 23, at 25, at 29. There are all of these invisible deadlines with our careers and with love and drinking and drugs. I can't do coke at 25. I need to be in a LTR at 27. I can't vomit from drinking at 26. I just can't! We feel so much guilt for essentially acting our age and making mistakes. We're obsessed with this idea of being domesticated and having our shit together. It's kind of sad actually because I don't think we ever fully get a chance to enjoy our youth. We're so concerned about doing things "the right way" that we lose any sense of pleasure in doing things the wrong way. Youth may be truly wasted on the young. — Ryan O'Connell

My mum is incredibly leftwing, and my dad was quite rightwing - no surprise they didn't stay together - and so I had two very conflicting political opinions as a child, neither of which I was interested in taking any notice of, being a sort of little reprobate. — Nick Love

Be your own source of strength and comfort. Believe that you are in love, happy, and fulfilled because you started by feeling that way about yourself, alone. Then the power of being together is amplified and you will experience the kind of joy that you can't begin to imagine. It starts within you and no one else. — Carol Lin

If you and I were so independent that we never needed to lean on the other, what kind of relationship would we have? What would be the point in us being together? Don't you see? Our love is all about being able to lean on the other. — Lindsay Paige

And then the kissing started again. There was no avoiding it, not when we were together like this, far away from the real world of our normal lives. The setting was too perfect. He was too perfect, despite being one of the most imperfect people I knew. And honestly, we'd wasted far too much time with doubts and games. The one thing you learn from constantly having your life in danger is that you'd better not waste it. — Richelle Mead

I'm trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat
patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I've found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well
the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page ... I was being creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. "Later" became "Lay. Ter." "An owl" became "A Nowl." "Sour metal smell" became "sourmetal smell."
Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot
death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings
a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater. — Arundhati Roy

Being come together in the same place, let there be one prayer, one supplication, one mind, one hope, in love and in joy undefiled. There is one Jesus Christ, than Whom nothing is more excellent. Therefore all should run together as into one temple of God, as to one altar, as to one Jesus Christ, who came forth from the Father, and is with and has gone to one. — Ignatius Of Antioch

And what is love, Angel? What is love! he yelled. Is it a pressure inside that makes me want to scream when you do this? he palmed his chest roughly, Is it my body in constant chaos when you're around me? Is it murder in cold blood when I even think of you being with anybody but me! he roared. Or maybe it's not being able to think or speak when your life is in danger, or wanting to spend every second - of every - fucking day with you, wanting to never leave your side. Is that love? Is it, Isadore? He drew closer and hit his fist repeatedly against his chest. Is it pain so hard and heavy that I can't fucking breathe unless I smell you, touch you, taste you? His body heaved as his bright green gaze seared her heart. Because if it is, Angel...he held his lips together and shook his head slowly, then I am....slain with an eternal and violent love for you. — Lucian Bane

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others. — Iris Murdoch

Once the Wheel of Love has been set in motion, there is no absolute rule.Your being contains mine; now I am truly part of you. Together as one, we form an unbroken circle of love.The wife is half the man, his priceless friend; Of pleasure, virtue, wealth, his constant source; A help throughout his earthly years; Through life unchanging, even beyond its end. — Bertrice Small

My husband and I make physical activity a priority in our lives, and our daughters love being active as well. And while we each have sports and activities we enjoy, we try to go for hikes or bike rides together whenever we get the chance. We've found that the best way to help our girls be active is to find activities they truly enjoy. — Michelle Obama

The reason why lovers and their mistresses never tire of being together is that they are always talking of themselves. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

True love is not:
A person's looks
A person's career or accomplishments
Longevity of a relationship
Children together
Memories made
Words spoken or declared
Chance meetings you feel are fate
Hobbies and interests shared
Or, Religious beliefs in common
True love is:
Seeing the potential in someone and helping them to rise and meet it. It is selfless. It doesn't care about being right or winning. It cares about you choosing right. It is your heart breaking when they go against the goodness in their nature and it is your heart rejoicing when he or she does something so generous and kind for others, that it inspires you to be even better. It is confidence that doesn't seek to possess, rather to set your soul free. — Shannon L. Alder

There is a defect in us
as human beings
because we think ourselves
a fortress, a mountain, unbreakable
but at the center
in that stillness of being
there is a chasm
of love
which echoes hope, compassion, empathy
try again, it says
and though the fault lines are full of darkness
we are held together by
the optimism and foolishness
of a single spark — Nadia Hasan