Margaret Atwood

"She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been all that convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting."

Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder: and Other Stories)

Oscar Wilde

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

Oscar Wilde

Jane Austen

"In vain have I struggled but it will not do, my feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you, how much I love and admire you."

Jane Austen

Sarah Dessen

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens, accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment"

Sarah Dessen

Louis de Bernières

"Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to make love every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident."

Louis de Bernières

Marilyn Monroe

"If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything."

"A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left."

"Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world."

"When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want. If they care enough to bother with what I do, then I'm already better than them."

"I don't mind living in a man's world, as long as I can be a woman in it."

"It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone."

"Ever notice how 'What the hell' is always the right answer?"

"Who said nights were for sleep?"

"It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on."

"If your gonna be two-faced at least make one of them pretty."

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents."

"I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't."

"If I'd observed all the rules I'd never have got anywhere."

"Success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn't that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you."

"We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle."

"I don't know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot!"

"It's all make believe, isn't it?"

"I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night — there must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest."

"She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad. And that’s important—you know ... "

"Diamonds are a girl's best friend."

"Everyone is a star and deserves a chance to shine."

"Women who seek to be equal with mean lack ambition"

"I've been on a calendar, but never on time."

"All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren't. "

"Well behaved women rarely make history"

""The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space""

"It's often just enough to be with someone. I don't need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You're not alone."

Marilyn Monroe

Isabel Allende

"Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars."

"When love exists, nothing else matters, not life’s predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity."

Isabel Allende

On love

"We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us."

Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved."

George Sand

"I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox."

Woody Allen

"We love because it's the only true adventure."

Nikki Giovanni

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

Anaïs Nin


"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead."

Bertrand Russell

"Those who do not have imaginary conversations do not love. "

Josephine Hart

"In vain have I struggled but it will not do, my feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you, how much I love and admire you."

Jane Austen

Danica Cooper

"Infatuation is blind, love is seeing all of someone and loving them anyway."

Danica Cooper

Matthew Sturges

"It’s the longing that ultimately undoes you. When it finds you, it gnaws at your bones and tugs at your chest. It fills you up inside and makes you dream dreams and then it drowns you. It keeps you in bed, clutching at your sheets while the world goes on outside. It smells like old leaves and cigarette smoke, mixed with the scent of far-off places you will hear of, but never see. It’s the gloss on a lover’s lips the moment you realize you will never actually kiss them. It is the bittersweet, unrequited love of creation and it will break your heart again and again and again. If you know the longing the way I do, then these words are redundant. We understand each other perfectly, you and I."

Matthew Sturges

Marilyn French

"Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire."

Marilyn French

e.e cummings

"i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"

e.e. cummings

Kim Edwards

"...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood."

Kim Edwards

Charlotte Brontë

"Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go ... with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed ... "

Charlotte Brontë

Orson Scott-Card

"To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you."

Orson Scott-Card

CS Lewis

"When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half hour – into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had; to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a common vision."

C.S. Lewis

James Kavanaugh

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love. For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves."

James Kavanaugh

Tom Stoppard

"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."

Tom Stoppard

Leona Blair

"She loved him. It was a pale description of how she felt, but she could find no other words. To watch him, to hear him, to simply be in the same space with him made her heart sing."

Leona Blair

Helen Fielding

"I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts."

Helen Fielding