A collection
Everyone becomes a poet
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
Plato, Symposium 196e · Agathon
A letter, 1814
“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.”
Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it.
Jane Austen, Persuasion
December 1795
“I awake full of you.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, to Josephine, December 1795
To Fanny, 1819
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days.”
John Keats, to Fanny Brawne, 3 July 1819
Immortal Beloved
“My angel, my all, my very self.”
Today, yesterday, what longing with tears for you. You. My life. My all.
Beethoven, letter to the Immortal Beloved, 6 July 1812
Portuguese 43
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese 43
Two souls
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
A letter
“God is my witness that if Augustus,emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage,it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called your mistress than his empress.”
Heloise, letter to Abelard
A seal
“Set me as a seal upon your heart.”
For love is strong as death.
Song of Songs 8:6
Sonnet 116
“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
Vita Nuova
“Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me.”
Dante, Vita Nuova
Two solitudes
“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”
Rilke
The film that asked
“Do you think you could fall in love with someone just through their words?”
This house begins there. One picture of the eyes. Then the letter. A romantic, somewhere, is already writing.
Rob Burns, Love Again (2023)
The best kind
“The best kind of love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.”
Love heals
Love awakens
Love transforms
The Notebook named the climate.
We keep the walk.
Noah, The Notebook (2004)
True Romance
“I had to come all the way from the highways and byways of Tallahassee, Florida to Motor City, Detroit to find my true love.”
Heat without a speech. Alabama, in the rain of that film. Surrender is not a merger.
Alabama Whitman, True Romance (1993)