“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to deeply seen and known, and when we honour the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection. Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.”
– Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
“It’s a very dangerous state. You are inclined to recklessness and kind of tune out the rest of your life and everything that’s been important to you. It’s actually not all that pleasurable. I don’t know who the hell wants to get in a situation where you can’t bear an hour without somebody’s company.”
– Colin Firth
“I desire to write, to be wildly in love, support my son to be who he is, keep my hair thick and shiny, get more tattoos, recite mantras, speak onstage, sleep in linen sheets, drive alone in the wide open spaces of New Mexico for hours, be flexible and productive, be alone at parties, be alone at home, be alone, be liked-loved-respected, keep a temple-tidy house, drive a reliable car, make millions of dollars and give lots away, meditate, get caught in thunderstorms, dance long and hard, wear cashmere, make things that make people want to make things of their own.”
– Danielle LaPorte, The Desire Map
“I always thought a woman could not separate her heart from her sexuality. I now believe it is the soul and the passion that cannot be separated. A woman expresses her soul through her sexual passion… A woman abandons herself in passion in the moment when soul and body are one. This can only happen with a man she first trusts, and secondly loves.”
– Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection
“Kissing also helped me to recall that silence is sometimes more comforting than conversation. One morning, Jamie seemed preoccupied and I was ready to launch into questions like “What’s on your mind?” and “Is everything okay?” “You seem distracted?” Then, I realized, Jamie doesn’t need that kind of talk. Instead, I gave him a long kiss. That seemed to cheer him up.”
– Gretchen Rubin, Happier at Home
“He was a mathematician, a revolutionary, and a poet; for a time, this idyllic friendship was one of the closest Sonya was ever to have. Heir common interests brought a responsive interchange of thought, and Sonya, who was capable of monumental emotions, was intoxicated by this union.
It was Sonya’s own inflexibility that kept the two apart, for she was never able to compromise between her work and her personal life. To withdraw from competition in Paris would have represented in her mind (and to the world, she thought) a conspicuous proof of woman’s incompetence. The strong force of circumstances propelled her into a frenetic effort to win a prize, the enjoyment of which was diminished because of her dual loyalties.
Sonya attempted to hide from her less intimate friends the subsequent heartbreak she suffered. She preferred to express her feelings in literary compositions.”
– Sonya Corvin-Krukovksy Kovalevsky (Women in Mathematics by Lynn M. Osen)
“This isn’t how it works. When someone show you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
– Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl
“To live a soulful life, you must be willing to stand alone, up against what everyone and everything in our society tells you is right for you, and ask what your heart wants, what your very being desires. You have to be willing to love who you really love, not who you are supposed to love.”
– Robin Rice, The Tiferet Talk Interviews
“Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us ip when we fall… We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You could Be Normal
I’ve discovered that the experience of love is ever changing. There are posts on creative life about both love and heartache, and not one post is the same.
How does love feel to you right now?
Christine Bissonnette
Latest posts by Christine Bissonnette (see all)
- A conversation about belonging at the Vancouver Writer’s Fest - October 28, 2015
- Creativity is our common language – it is how we communicate what we are afraid to say as ourselves - September 10, 2015
- “I left something important at home during week 1 at the National Voice Intensive” – entry by Christine Bissonnette - May 22, 2015