4
" Just for future reference, don't use words like " love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it's a currency that's easily devalued. Pretty soon you're saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it's an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don't hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means--more. More, more--give me something more. A couple of years from now, when you're on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that--and I pity you if it does--you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs and you have to be willing to drown in it, Kevin. You'd have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that's what real love feels like--choking. They used to bury some women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave. That's why the second most abused word is " forever" . "
6
" Most women go through life looking for love, and looking for someone to treat them like a queen. For some women finding real love seems to be something that will never happen. I believe that finding love is not as hard as people make it seem. The reason that some women can't find real love is because they look for more than just real love. A lot of women know what they need in a relationship, and thats for a man to love that woman with all of his heart, and to treat her real good. Most women have guys in their life or guys that try to get with them that could really love them and treat them real good. Those are usually the guys that get forced into that friend zone or rejected upfront. See those guys could give them what they need, but not what they want. “Wants” can be anything from a woman wanting a man to have certain materialistic things, or she could want him to look a certain way, those are a few examples of the things that some of them want, but they vary depending on the female. What some females don't understand is that none of the things that they want has anything with love or how that person will treat you. You could find a man that looks perfect, has a house and car, he can be a college graduate with a good job, and you could still end up being with a person that doesn't truly love you, and will treat you like shit. What I am trying to say is that the person who could treat you good and really love you could already be in your life, but you could have been blinded by the things you want in a man so you overlooked the person that you were really looking for. And by the way there are men that do the same thing; I just wanted to be clear on that. "
12
" Loving yourself isn't just about celebrating your accomplishments and nurturing your talents. Those things are nice, sure. But that's not how we know others love us. We know others love us when they see us with our face on the ground, crying and weak, feeling like we've got nothing to offer the world—and they smile, and they reach out, and they love us anyway. Loving yourself is what you do when you fail, when you don't know, when you screw up, when you forget, when you lose everything. Loving yourself is what you do when you can't approve of what you've done. Loving yourself is what you do when you're not sure if it's going to get better. Loving yourself is what you must do in those moments when you can't like yourself. Real love is when you reach out for no good reason at all, except to love. "
― Vironika Tugaleva
19
" I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If she's right, you only have to look at the pictures Rembrandt painted of Titus, and there are quite a lot, to see that they loved each other. Because that is what you're seeing. Complete attention, one of the other..." but in that case," he said, speaking the words as the thought came to him, " all art is love, because all art is about looking closely, isn't it? Looking closely at what's being painted." " The artist looking closely while he paints, the viewer looking closely at what has been painted. I agree. All true art, yes. Painting, Writing-literature-also. I think it is. And bad art is a failure to observe with complete attention. So, you see why I like the history of art. It's the study of how to observe life with complete attention. It's the history of love. "