Misc. quotes on love, from a list curated by Austin Kleon

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.” —John Williams, Stoner

“She knew me better than anyone else in the world. And still wanted to have lunch with me.” —Julian Barnes, The Sense Of An Ending

“To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.” —Iris Murdoch

”A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.” —G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous, that you realize just how much you love them.” —Agatha Christie, from my wife’s favorite book, An Autobiography

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.” —W.H. Auden “Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain’s open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. … Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” —Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, A General Theory of Love