Symptoms of True Love

Love is a universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;

Are omens and nightmares,
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a song:
For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For searching look.

Take courage, lover!
Can you endure such grief
At any hand but hers?
Robert Graves


Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibiltiy.
Magnanimous Despair alone.
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'r have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crouds it self betwixt.
For Fate with jealous Eye does see.
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her Tyrannick pow'r depose.
And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac'd,
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac'd.
Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be cramp'd into a Plaisphere.
As Lines so Loves Oblique may well
Themselves in every Angle greet:
But ours so truly Paralel,
Though infinite can never meet.
Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debarrs,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.
Andrew marvell


Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up save in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in the casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
C.S. Lewis


Love is the burden of all natures's odes;
the song of the birds is an epithalamium,
a hymeneal. The marriage of the flowers
spots the meadows and fringes the hedges
with pearls and diamonds. In the deep waters,
in the high air, in woods and pastures,
and the bowels of the earth, this is the
employment and condition of all things.
Henry David Thoreau


Love is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
Emily Dickinson


To love a person means to agree to grow old with him.
Albert Camus


Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her,
Next time, herself! not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew:
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.

Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune,
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see, with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune.
Robert Browning


The draft of love was cool and sweet
You gave me in the cup,
But, ah, love's fire is keen and fleet,
And I am burning up.

Unless the tears I shed for you
Shall quench this burning flame,
It will consume me through and throught
And leave but ash, a name.
paul Laurence Dunbar