Jane Hirshfield Quotes

This world has few redeeming features, and one is the capacity for people to love one another with great, enduring passion.

The first thing is love: love deeply. If you have been with a person for a few years, in deep love, and you have experienced all the joys and all the miseries, and still you decide to be with the person, then marriage is okay. Because marriage is only a legal arrangement, it cannot make anything more beautiful than it is. It can only make it ugly, it cannot beautify it. Once it is settled legally, once you start taking each other for granted, things will start going down rather than rising high.

We haven't lost romance in the digital age, but we may be neglecting it. In doing so, antiquated art forms are taking on new importance. The power of a handwritten letter is greater than ever. It's personal and deliberate and means more than an e-mail or text ever will.

I guess Judd (Apatow) is my soul mate because we have a lot of hard times, and it's great at times, too.

You are my lover, you're my best friend. You're in my soul.

My true love hath my heart, and I have his

Love, I've come to understand, is more than three words mumbled before bedtime.

Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.

Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.

I mean, it's not surprising, really. Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It's, like, part of you for good.

She pulls me toward her, tells me, “You’re sweet, you know that?” I crack a smile. Life will not tear us apart this time. Our hearts will see to it.

Men commonly couple with their idea of marriage a slight degree at least of sensuality; but every lover, the world over, believesin its inconceivable purity.

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.

When she wraps her arms around my neck, all I want to do is protect this girl for the rest of my life.

We were so wholly one I had not thought That we could die apart. I had not thought That I could move,—and you be stiff and still! That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb! I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof In some firm fabric, woven in and out; Your golden filaments in fair design Across my duller fibre.

He who, silent, loves to be with us - he who loves us in our silence - has touched one of the keys that ravish hearts.

Making love, she'd always believed, was more than simply a pleasurable act between two people. It encompassed all that a couple was supposed to share: trust & commitement, hopes & dreams, a promise to make it through whatever the future might bring. The greater the love; the greater the tragedy when it is over

Westley and I are joined by the bond of love and you cannot track that, not with a thousand bloodhounds, and you cannot break it, not with a thousand swords.

One who has loved truly can never lose entirely.

Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.

Love is a very important part of life, and you have to give in to it. But after a while it ceases to be such an important force in life, and that's the time when you should give in to age and stop doing it, if you don't have the impulse any more.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?

It is the difference betwixt lust and love that this is fixed, that volatile. Love grows, lust wastes by enjoyment.

You fall in love with people's minds.

a laotong relationship is made by choice...when we first looked in each other's eyes in the palanquin I felt something special pass between us--like a spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. But a single spark is not enough to warm a room nor is a single seed enough to grow a fruitful crop. Deep love--true-heart love--must grow.