“What else can love do? If we’re selling it, we’d better point out that it’s a starting-point for civic virtue. You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you [...]
“Loving - that means assuming nothing, bringing nothing along from anywhere else, forgetting everything and being ready to receive from one person what you had before and everything else besides.”
“Since this is a hard and sad truth for the telling; those whom nature has sacrificed to her ends - her mysterious ends that often lie hidden - are sometimes endowed with a vast will to loving, with an endless capacity for suffering also, which must go hand in hand with their love.”
“To look at an object, a person, or a landscape with love and without attachment, with no desire for appropriation of it, is to see it more clearly.”
“But what can walls and distances avail against invisible antennae which, when the heart is enamoured, are extended, sensitive to touch and feel, and, on detecting a blemish, are retracted.”
“It’s so easy to love somebody, I tell you, where there’s nothing else around.”
“Somebody [...] should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it!”