1. She’s still caught up in the breathlessness, the airlessness of love –Margaret Atwood, “Wilderness Tips”
2. Don’t worry, my dear little demon… love and vengeance, hunting together, will always strike down their prey –Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette
3. Love is the crocodile in the river of desire –Barthriari, The Vairaguya Sataka
4. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it –The Bible, Song of Solomon 8:7
5. Love is a pardonable insanity –Sébastian R.M. Chamfort, Maxims and Thoughts
6. A spring of love gushed from my heart –Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner”
7. But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow / With more, not onley bee no quintessence, / But mixt of all stuffes –John Donne, “Loves Growth”
8. Some that have deeper digged love’s mine than I, / Say where his centric happiness doth lie –John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy”
9. We for loves clergie only’are instruments –John Done, “A Valediction: Of the Booke”
10. Do I venture away too far / from the hot coast of your love / whose southern virtues charmed me? –Keith Douglas, “Song”
11. Love… had sunk into some cold wintry hibernating part of herself –Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground
12. Gentle Murmurs, sweet Complaining, / Sighs that blow the Fire of Love –John Dryden, “Song” (from King Arthur; or The British Worthy
13. The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It’s a perpetual wound –Maureen Duffy, “Wounds”
14. Love… The bright foreigner, the foreign self –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals
15. Adams: When I was young, the trees of love forgave me –Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners
16. Love… / An impermanent treat waiting to be signed / By the two enemies? –Thom Gunn, “To His Cynical Mistress,” Fighting Terms
17. Love is a dunghill… and I’m the cock that gets on it to crow –Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
18. Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied / And springs of grace flow everywhere –Ho Xuan Hong, “Spring Watching Pavilion”
19. In the religion of love, to pray is to pass, / by a shining word, into the inner chamber / of the other –Galway Kinnell, “The Man on the Hotel Room Bed”
20. There is a harvest for the heart alone; / The seed of love must be / Eternally / Resown –Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “Second Sowing”, The Unicorn and Other Poems
21. Love is a game–yes? / I think it is a drowning –Amy Lowell, “Twenty-four Hokku on a Modern Theme,” What’s O’Clock
22. Love can be the most dreadful disguise that hate assumes –William March, “The Dog and Her Rival”
23. Her husky voice still suited to the penumbra of love –Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth
24. They say love is a two-way street. But I don’t believe it, because the one I’ve been on for the last two years was a dirt road –Terry McMillan, Waiting to Exhale
25. Love is the mind’s strong physic, and the pill that leaves the heart sick and overturns the will –Thomas Middleton, Blurt, Master Constable, III
26. In the great seesaw of love, she’s up now and you’re down –Sue Miller, For Love
27. Cleante: They say that love is often the fruit of marriage –Moliere, The Miser, Act 4
28. Cover with ashes our love’s cold crater –Dorothy Parker, “Nocturne”, Enough Rope
29. But love is a durable fire / in the mind ever burning –Sir Walter Ralegh, “Walsinghame”
30. Love must have wings to fly away from love / And to fly back again –Edward Arlington Robinson, “Tristram”
31. Love’s a nervous, awkward, overmastering brute; if you can’t rein him, it’s best to have no truck with him –Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
32. Caesar: Let not the piece of virtue, which is set / Betwixt us as the cyment [cement] of our love / … be the ram to batter / The fortress of it –William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Art 3, scene 2, line 23
33. Rosalind: Love is merely a madness. And deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen –William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 3, scene 2, line 400
34. Silvius: You meet in some fresh cheek the power of fancy, / Then shall you know the wounds invisible / That Love’s keen arrows make –William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 3, scene 2, line 18
35. King: There lives within the very flame of love / A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it –William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4, scene 7, line 113
36. Princess: If frosts and fasts, hard lodgings and thin weeds, / Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love… / I will be thine –William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 5, scene 2, line 809
37. Jessica: Love is blind, and lovers cannot see / The pretty follies that themselves commit –William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, scene 6, line 36
38. Against love’s fire fear’s frost hath dissolution –William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, line 355
39. It [love] is the star to every wandering bark / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken –William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116″, line 7
40. King Richard: Love… / Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world –William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, Act 5, scene 5, line 66
41. Troilus: Sweet love is food for Fortune’s tooth –William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act 4, scene 5, line 293
42. Proteus: O! how this spring of love resmbleth / The uncertain glory of an April day –William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 2, scene 1, line 84
43. Valentine: Love’s a mighty Lord –William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 2, scene 4, line 137
44. [Love] comes, it blooms, it bears fruit and dies –Wallace Stevens, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”
45. Love was the pearl of his oyster –Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Our Lady of Pain”
46. Wordsworth complained in a charming piece of unreasonableness that his wife’s love, which had been a fountain, was now only a well –Francis Thompson, Quoted in The World’s Great Letters
47. The rose of our love and the clean / horse of our courage –Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet”
48. Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes –Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Optimism”
49. Love lodged in a woman’s breast / Is but a guest –Sir Henry Wotton, “A Woman’s Heart”
50. Tangled I was in love’s snare –Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Elder, “Tangled was I in Love’s Snare”
51. Love is a fiend, a fire, a heaven, a hell –Richard Banfield, “The Affectionate Shepherd”
52. Love is a mask, with death behind –William Bell, “To a Lady on Her Marriage”
53. Love–a temporary insanity curable by marriage –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
54. Love is a spaniel that prefers even punishment from one hand to caresses from another –Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon
55. Love is a tyrant sparing none –Pierre Corneille, The Cid, Act 1, Scene 2
56. Love is a sickness full of woes, / All remedies refusing –Samuel Daniel, “Hymen’s Triumph”
57. Love is… A tempest everlasting –Samuel Daniel, “Love is a Sickness”
58. Love is a rope, for it ties and holds us in its yoke –Hadewijch, Dutch poetess
59. Love is the mqster key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and most easily of all, the gates of fear –Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
60. Love unbridled is a volcano that burns down and lays waste all around –Baron Richard von Kraft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis
61. Love is a jewel that wins the world –Moira O’Neill, “Beauty’s a Flower”
62. Dion: Love is a word–a shameless ragged ghost of a word–begging at all doors for life at any price! –Eugene O’Neill, The Great God Brown, Prologue
63. Love is woman’s moon and sun –Dorothy Parker, “General Review of the Sex Situation,” Enough Rope
64. Romeo: Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs –William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, scene 1, line 193
65. Marriage… the hospital of love –Anonymous, German Proverb
66. Marriage… a fever in reverse: it starts with heat and ends with cold –Anonymous, German Proverb
67. Marriage is the scud missile of relationships –Anonymous proverb, quoted on Murphy Brown, aired April 13, 1992
68. Marriage… a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness –Renee de Chateauneuf Rieux
69. Rilke had begun to slip out of the knot of his marriage in the moment that he tied it –William H. Gass
70. Marriage: a souvenir of love –Helen Rowland, Reflections of a Bachelor Girl
71. Marriage the wastepaper basket of the emotions –Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory
72. It seems to me that marriage is a small container… barely large enough to hold some children. Two inner lives, two lifelong meditations of whatever complexity, burst out of it and out of it, cracking it, deforming it –Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief in The Quarterly, Vol 1, Spring 1987
73. Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas –Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
74. Man is fire; woman is firewood; the devil comes along and blows on them –Anonymous, Spanish Proverb
75. Woman is the chain by which a man is attached to the chariot of folly –Bhartrihari, “The Sringa Satak”
76. She was the glove that he held in his fingers –Katherine Mansfield, “A Dill Pickle”
77. [A relationship:] It’s all done, it is quiet and still, / a piece of old cheese too hard to chew –Marge Piercy, “Letter to be disguised as a gas bill”, 4-Telling
78. The struggle of the sexes its the motor of history –Alain Robbe-Grillet, Djinn
79. Rosalind: Men are April when they woo, December when wed; maids are May when they are maids, but they sky changes when they are wives –William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 4, scene 1, line 147
80. They never met again; she had been a false dawn –John Updike, “Baby’s First Step”, The New Yorker, July 27, 1992
81. A woman is a bountiful table that one sees with different eyes before and after the meal –Anonymous, French Proverb
82. Granger: But what is a woman?–Only one of Nature’s agreeable blunders –Hannah Cowley, Who’s the Dupe, Act 2, scene 1
83. Le Bret: Who and what is this woman? Cyrano: Nature’s own snare to allure manhood. A white rose wherin / Love lies in ambush for his natural prey –Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 1
84. Woman and God… the two rocks on which a man must either anchor or be wrecked –Frederick William Robertson, Sermon
85. The fact of woman / is “not the sound of the flute / but very poison” –Marianne Moore, “Marriage”
86. You ought to remember that the woman is the weaker vessel –Hang her, let her carry less sail, then! –Sarah Orne Jewett, “The Courting of Sister Wisby”
87. Woman would leaven the male mass by her presence –George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
