Don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It's in the struggle?

"Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul.... yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

James Thurber

Men get very fond of the things they defend, especially when they find themselves defending something stupid.


Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful short story, The Widget, The Wadget, and Boff 

For there are these three things that endure: Faith, Hope and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.
Run after love and be zealous for the gifts of The Spirit, that you may know the truth.

1 Corinthians 13-14 

Ullrich told me about a small boy who was dying of neuroblastoma. “His mother made it very clear to him that she would see him again in Heaven someday. ... But he was worried about how he would find her. So they made a plan to meet in the front left corner of Heaven."

Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker, "Lives Less Ordinary" (January 20, 2014)

O place, O form,
How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit,
Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls
To thy false seeming!

Blood, thou art blood.


William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Relationships were ... utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

Te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora,
Et teneam moriens deficiente manu.

(May I be looking at you when my last hour has come,
And dying may I hold you with my weakening hand.)

Tibullus

Everyone has a voice that can be lost.

Jessica Otto, 4AM

Quiero hacer contigo
Lo que la primavera
Hace con los cerezos

Pablo Neruda, Poem 14 of the Twenty Poems of Love

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chopp'd with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
   'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
   Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 62

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thyself?
Thyself I call it, being strange to me,
That, undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself, and not me too. 

William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act 2, Scene 2

This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization
It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away
Your love will be
Safe with me

Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Stacks.

The God of Small Things....If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Love is not a simple relation to someone else; it is always an attitude, a view of the world, a character trait.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers