soracities:

“Bless one woman’s brows, her lips
and their salt, bless the roundness
of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern
by which I live my life.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, “Envois”

“There was once a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her-immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.
When I met Ana I knew: I loved her to the point of invention.”

— Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“I think of all the things he has been to me…Love. Lodestone. My true north. I turn always to him.”

— Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves

“I am never away from you. Even now,
I shall not leave you. In another world,
I shall be still that one who loves you, loves you
Beyond measure, beyond .”

— Edmond Rostand, “Cyrano de Bergerac”

“Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.”

— David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary

— Elisabeth Hewer, “Dove Hands”

“I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close…I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory…I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this…I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

— Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.”

— John Keats, letter to Fanny Brawne

— Margaret Atwood, “Corpse Song”

“I really like the idea of love as a violent act—not to the person that you love, but against the world. To say to somebody, ‘I love you; by extension, I hate all other things.”

— Hozier, from an interview

“Your voice comes out of an old world. That is not eloquence. It is the quickest way to express it. It is the only true world for me. An old world, and yet it is a world that has no existence except in you. — It is as if I were in the proverbial far country and never knew how much I had become estranged from the actual reality of the things that are the real things of my heart, until the actual reality found a voice — you are the voice.”

— Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll

“What am I, if not yours? /  What do I do with my hands when they are just hands?”

— Olivia Gatwood, “The Lover as a Cult”

— Jeff Buckley, “Lover You Should Have Come Over”

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I walk around the cottage, touching things because you touched them. A book of Rilke. A plate that once had jelly on it. A hairbrush from which I have not yet removed the chestnut hairs. It’s a kind of sickness, isn’t it? An illness that has invaded me. Or rather the return of a chronic illness. This bout fatal, as I know it must be.I think that words corrupt and oxidize love. That it is better not to write of it. Even memory, I think, is full of rust and decay.I have always been faithful to you. If faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.”

— Anita Shreve, The Last Time They Met

— Twenty-One Pilots, “Tear in My Heart”

“Then you kissed me - I felt
hot wax on my forehead.
I wanted it to leave a mark:
that’s how I knew I loved you.
Because I wanted to be burned, stamped,
to have something in the end.”

— Louise Glück, “Marathon”

“ ‘Love’, this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or 'will love’ or 'have loved’. All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is '爱’ (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.
If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.”

— Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

— Li-Young Lee, “This Room and Everything In It”

“And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.”

— Andre Dubus, “On Charon’s Wharf”

“My youth / My youth is yours / Trippin’ on skies, sippin’ waterfalls / My youth / My youth is yours / Run away now and forevermore / My youth / My youth is yours / The truth so loud you can’t ignore / My youth, my youth, my youth / My youth is yours”

— Troye Sivan, “Youth”

“There are other paintings of Hendrickje [by Rembrandt]. Before the Bathsheba in the Louvre, or the Woman Bathing in the National Gallery (London), I am wordless. Not because their genius inhibits me, but because the experience from which they derive and which they express—desire experiencing itself as something as old as the known world, tenderness experiencing itself as the end of the world, the eyes’ endless rediscovery, as if for the first time, of their love of a familiar body—all this comes before and goes beyond words. […]
In the painting of the Woman in Bed there is a complicity between the woman and the painter. This complicity includes both reticence and abandon, day and night. The curtain of the bed, which Hendrickje lifts up with her hand, marks the threshold between daytime and nighttime…She has not yet slept. Her gaze follows him as he approaches. In her face the two of them are reunited. Impossible now to separate the two images: his image of her in bed, as he remembers her: her image of him as she sees him approaching their bed.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

— Hozier, “Better Love”