The Course Of Love Quotes
"A marriage doesn’t begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soul mate."
"It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soul mate. We needn’t have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn’t come into it."
"Instinctively he teases out an entire personality from the details."
"For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence."
"The intensity may seem trivial—humorous, even—yet this reverence for instinct is not a minor planet within the cosmology of relationships. It is the underlying central sun around which contemporary ideals of love revolve."
"It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love to reach a few different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic...are what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone."
"What we typically call love is only the start of love."
"The stories of relationships, maintained over decades, without obvious calamity or bliss, remain—fascinatingly and worryingly—the exceptions among the narratives we dare to tell ourselves about love’s progress."
"Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion."
"Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us."
"We owe to Christianity the view that sex should only ever rightly occur in the presence of love."
"The belief that true love must entail wholehearted fidelity."
"Monogamy has been declared a necessary and crowning expression of emotional commitment and virtue."
"Sex doesn’t always have to be bound up with love. It can sometimes be a purely physical, aerobic activity engaged in without substantive emotional meaning."
"Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds."
"Love is, in its purest form, a kind of service."
"The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity."
"The world can never reward on a large enough scale all the hopes which one generation places on the narrow shoulders of another."
"To have a child is, at the outset, at least, to make an assault on perfection, to attempt to create not just another average human being but an exemplar of distinctive perfection."
"Mediocrity, albeit the statistical norm, can never be the initial goal; the sacrifices required to get a child to adulthood are simply too great."
"The relationship nevertheless makes Kirsten worry a little for her daughter’s future."
"He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of how a man might ideally behave with a woman."
"The survival of the species hinges on children eventually getting fed up and heading off into the world armed with hopes of finding more satisfying sources of excitement."
"We are never through with the requirement for acceptance."
"Sexual desire is driven by a wish to establish closeness—and is hence contingent on a preexisting sense of distance."
"To develop this love story—one logical consequence of his enthusiasm—would in reality end up being the most self-centered and uncaring thing he could do."
"We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for."
"A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be."
"It takes a superhuman wisdom to avoid the consoling conclusion that one has the harder life."
"A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills a marriage."
"Attachment theory, developed by the psychologist John Bowlby and colleagues in England in the 1950s, traces the tensions and conflicts of relationships back to our earliest experience of parental care."
"But Mrs. Fairbairn doesn’t like being pressed to take sides. This is part of her genius. She doesn’t care for anyone being 'in the right.' She wants to sort out what each side is feeling and then make sure the other side hears it sympathetically."
"It’s an absurd question, he thinks; last night’s irritation begins to revive in him."
"I feel exactly as you would expect: that she’s horrible."
"I feel I’m alone. That I don’t matter. That she doesn’t give a damn about me."
"Forgiveness at this point is not in the cards."
"What is it like for you when you think Kirsten has let you down?"
"A man who screams and swears at his wife hardly seems a prime candidate to be thought of as a poor scared lambie."
"Kirsten, do you think shouting, and sometimes swearing, are the actions of a man who feels strong?"
"Insomnia can, when it goes on for weeks, be hell."
"Only at those rare moments when the stars are out and nothing further will be needed from us until dawn can we loosen our hold on our ego."
"He is a coward, a dreamer, an unfaithful husband, and an overly possessive, clingy father."
"He sees he is a man with an exaggerated longing for Romantic love who nevertheless understands little about kindness and even less about communication."
"Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain."
"The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love."
"We don’t have to know a stranger very well before knowing this about them."
"We will all by definition end up with that stock character of our nightmares, "the wrong person.""
"To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against the tide."
"We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former."
"We must concede that adultery cannot be a workable answer, for no one can be its victim and not feel forever cut to the core."
"No one can predict the eventual fate of this photo, he knows: how it will be read in the future, what the viewer will look for in their eyes."
"He knows how to love Kirsten, how to have sufficient faith in himself, and how to feel compassion for and be patient with his children."