10 Favourite Love Quotes

Here’s 10 of my personal favourites:

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“For I am the daughter of Elrond. I shall not go with him when he departs to the Havens: for mine is the choice of Luthien, and as she so have I chosen, both the sweet and the bitter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you’ve already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don’t think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

And in the end, I leave you with the most heartbreaking love poem by Pablo Neruda, placed to incredible violin, watch here.

Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair …a review

The book I’m currently reading is taking a while; so I thought of telling you here about a book that I often read. Pablo Neruda is one of my favourite poets. Now, reading poetry is not the same as reading novels, to me. For one thing, I like to read poetry (especially love poems) aloud; which safely rules out enjoying the read anywhere outside of my room.

Also, for poetry, one needs the setting, the mood, the slow-dance, and the jazz. Night-time sounds may contribute, also dewfall. Shhh…

 Neruda’s poetry spans across five – six decades and themes of love, eroticism, nature, melancholy abound. They grow on the reader, like damp moss… Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair was published when he was 20. The words of the poet far surpass in maturity his age and the times.

 “It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour

which the night fastens to all the timetables.

 The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.

Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

 Deserted like the wharves at dawn.

Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

 Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

 It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!”

 A movie based on his life, ‘Il Postino (The Postman)’ also has some similar and wonderful poems. But of all his works, this one remains my favourite. For simply, the pain, the wrenching of guts that he has achieved here, few others have managed to fleetingly comprehend.

I think I know the reason why we never had Neruda in school. Even if one brands his love poems too mature, his nature and political ones are not; they could be a part of schoolwork. But they aren’t; because he said little, he wrote little. It is difficult to teach stuff like that with “The poet wants to say…” because the poet just wanted to say:

 “Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

 Write, for example,’The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’

 The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

 Through nights like this one I held her in my arms

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

 She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.”

And this is just translated… imagine the impact of the original.