Love Phrases Quotes & Sayings

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. — Virginia Woolf

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

Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales - Full of sound and fury
- signifying nothing - he said no word at all. — Thomas Hardy

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis'
by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love. — John Barth

There's a beautiful forgiveness practice I love which is quite simple. It's called "Ho'oponopono" (pronounced: ho-o-pono-pono) and it's a lot easier to do than it is to say. It's a Kahuna Hawaiian technique, which involves repeating four phrases internally toward yourself or the person whom you're having a hard time forgiving. — Marci Shimoff

I painted the words "GREAT ADVENTURE" in Beijing, Dallas, San Francisco, Copenhagen, and Japan. What it means to me is completely different to everybody else. And that's what I love about random words and phrases taken out of context: everyone applies their own context. If you want to apply something political or meaningful to a word I wrote on the side of the wall, then it's up to you. — Ben Eine

We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, 'foreplay'. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me which I didn't say out loud because they sounded so banal - Here we are, or, This again or Yes, this. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again. When we fell silent, we would lie so close we were mouth to mouth, delaying the union which bound us all the more because of this prelude. — Ian McEwan

I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be. — John Shelby Spong

Americans specially love superlatives. The phrases 'biggest in the world,' 'finest in the world,' are on all lips. Unless President Hayes is a strong man, they will soon come to boast that their government is composed of the 'biggest scoundrels' in the world. — Isabella Bird

Love or perish" we are told and we tell ourselves. The phrase is true enough so long as we do not interpret it as "Mingle or be a failure. — Phyllis McGinley

When I'm on the operating table, I'm happy for the surgeon to treat me as a machine, but the moment I return to consciousness I have other needs and aspirations that should be recognized. We're not here only to survive or extend our individual or species life but to do something seemingly more difficult, for which I've used words and phrases like 'love' and the 'Kingdom of God'. — George Pattison

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else. — Noam Chomsky

The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of - I'm making it sound too noble; no otorund phrases must be used. Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death. — Salman Rushdie

Who loved without any genuine feeling, with superfluous phrases, affectedly, hysterically, with an expression that suggested that it was not love nor passion, but something more significant; ... — Anton Chekhov

For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it. — Malcolm Gladwell

I pick up my sandwich and take a small bite, chewing extra slow in order to delay having to respond. He's freaking me out again, with his confident gaze and his matter-of-fact tone. I've never met a guy who can throw out phrases like "love at first sight" and "something magical happened" without at least having the decency to blush or look mortified — Elle Kennedy

There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see. — D.H. Lawrence

She wanted to write to him. Tell him she was glad he was back, that he was alive, that he was home and safe. But words to him no longer fit right in her her mouth.Words which belonged in his ownership were no longer hers to give. Silence was the only acceptable state her heart would grant. He would never know what he missed, because she refused to be heard in his presence. All the words he could have had, all the phrases he might have danced with. The smiles which would have been imprinted upon his heart, would never be. And his lips would never be able to reply to the words she could not say. — Coco J. Ginger

O Fame! if I ever took delight in thy praises, Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases, Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover The thought that I was not unworthy to love her. — Lord Byron

Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases? — Kazuo Ishiguro

I have discovered in my long life that there are many words and phrases which have more power than any spell of magick. The most well-known of these is, of course, I love you. But by far the most deadly is, if only. For these two words can strip a man's strength, his courage and his confidence. They become the father of regret and anguish and pain. — David Gemmell

I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I do not love.
Love is only for women who are complete.
I cannot love while my heart lacks safety and in my wallet there is enough money to pay for a loaf of bread.
I cannot kiss you while I am thinking of the house rent and the electricity bills.
I cannot behave as a mature woman who can exchange with you phrases of love while my childhood is not yet complete.
This is an unfair compromise for safety and for existence.
We only call it love to preserve our dignity. — Jihad Eltabey

You remember all those phrases about how 'these people' - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese. — Neil Sheehan

I love women who are bosses and who don't constantly worry about what their employees think of them. I love women who don't ask, "Is that OK?" after everything they say. I love when women are courageous in the face of unthinkable circumstances, like my mother when she was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. Or like Gabrielle Giffords writing editorials for the New York Times about the cowardice of Congress regarding gun laws and using phrases like "mark my words" like she is Clint Eastwood. How many women say stuff like that? — Mindy Kaling

Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life. — Robert C. Solomon

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties. — Muriel Spark

On Hayao Miyazaki
I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.
"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said, "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."
Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?
"I don't think it's like the "pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb. — Roger Ebert

We've gotten to that stage all soulmates reach of speaking in broken phrases and incomplete sentences, our connected and all-knowing minds filling in the blanks left by redundant words. — A.J. Compton

We live in an age where people are like, "I'd love to catch up. Maybe text me later? But don't call because I don't really listen to my messages. But if you text me ... " We've displaced interaction into sound bites and untethered phrases and sentences that come up on the phone as Twitter feed. — Marc Maron

People speak because they are afraid of silence. They speak mechanically whether aloud or to themselves. They are intoxicated by this vocal gruel that ensnares every object and every being. They talk about rain and fine weather; they talk about money, about love, about nothing. And even when they are talking about their most exalted love, they use words uttered a hundred times, threadbare phrases. — Andrei Makine

the context of religion, interspirituality is the common heritage of humankind's spiritual wisdom and the sharing of wisdom resources across traditions. In terms of our developing human consciousness, interspirituality is the movement of all these discussions toward the experience of profound interconnectedness, unity consciousness, and oneness. A more heartfelt and experiential definition focuses on the deepest implications of these phrases, rolling them into a statement such as "a spirituality so based on the heart and unconditional love that it would be impossible to feel separate from anything." This definition has profound ethical implications. — Kurt Johnsons

Thus was their relationship born on the swift kiss of a pun. Neither suspected what the other would become to each of them. Like phrases running wild in the Logos, they knew neither who nor by what mechanism nor for what reason they were whistled for (if they understood that they were whistled for at all). They were simply compelled to come together. Sophia was the question, and Blip was the answer. And vice versa. — Tony Vigorito

My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end. — Ian McEwan

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem. — Virginia Woolf

Someone has beautifully analyzed the fruit of the Spirit in Gal. 5: 22, and shown that all the graces there mentioned are but various forms of love itself. The apostle is not speaking of different fruits, but of one fruit, the fruit of the Spirit, and the various words that follow are but phrases and descriptions of the one fruit, which is love itself. Joy, which is first mentioned, is love on wings; peace, which follows, is love folding its wings, and nestling under the wings of God; longsuffering is love enduring; gentleness is love in society; goodness is love in activity, faith is love confiding; meekness is love stooping; temperance is true self-love, and the proper regard for our own real interests, which is as much the duty of love, as regard for the interests of others. — A.B. Simpson

Here is what I know of love. It changes the way you treat me. I feel it in your hands. Your fingers. Your compositions. The sudden rush of peppy phrases, major sevenths, melody lines that resolve neatly and sweetly, like a valentine tucked in an envelope. Humans grow dizzy from new affection, and young Frankie was already dizzy when he and the mysterious girl descended from that tree. — Mitch Albom

Young love-making
that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to
the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung
are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust. — George Eliot

If you're having a hard time being compassionate to or forgiving of yourself or others, you repeat these four phrases directed to yourself or the other person: "I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you." And just by saying and feeling those phrases, you will find your heart starts to melt. — Marci Shimoff

I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant. — Evelyn Waugh

For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued. — Lucretius

Words, like anything else used too often, soon depreciate in value, lose their edge, and cease to bite into our lives. When phrases, such as unconditional love, trip too easily off the tongue, the speaker's ego may experience a temporary rush of exhilaration using an in salvation slogan, but his heart remains unchanged. — Brennan Manning

It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony. — Andre Breton

Every word, every phrase, wants to be in a sentence, when it is written for you. — M.F. Moonzajer

After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession ... and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love. — John Gresham Machen

I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists - I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Catching myself in the moment. Then I remember facts are just facts, circumstances are merely circumstances. Whenever I can catch myself having a negative thought, I do Self I-Dentity through Ho'oponopono by saying to myself the phrases "I love you," "I'm sorry," "Please forgive me," "Thank you" in any particular order. — Graham Shiels

I heard the phrases and I wanted all of me to call out in a song, a song that doesn't have words, a song that almost doesn't have noise. A lot of people take a short cut and call that feeling of song love. They just call it that because there isn't a way to describe it. But the word love doesn't describe the half of it. It doesn't do anything to bring to mind the song we all want so desperately to sing. — Jane Hamilton

There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil
improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?"
"Are you a young lady?"
"I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated. — Charlotte Bronte

Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all. — Christopher Hitchens

Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation. — Eric Maisel

The universe does not work in phrases; don't focus on the commas; just wait for the full stop. — Jude Idada

I love to use these phrases - 'with the greatest respect', 'in all modest', 'I humbly submit' - which in fact always imply the complete opposite. — William Boyd

Why do you look?" I mutter.
I half expect Magiano to tease me, spitting back one of his sarcastic phrases. But he doesn't smile. "We are drawn to stories," he says in a soft voice, "and every scar carries one." He lifts a hand and places his palm gently against the ruined side of my face, covering the scar.
I look down, embarrassed now. Instinctively, I reach up to brush some of my hair over my face - only to remember that I no longer have long locks.
"Hiding it makes you more beautiful," Magiano says. Then he takes his hand away, exposing my scar again. "But revealing it makes you you." He nods at me. "So wear it proudly. — Marie Lu

An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,
This art of writing billet-doux
In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies. — Leigh Hunt

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

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another. — Rabih Alameddine