Quotes from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“I told her how I thought you could always revise your life, how you could work and work on it, finesse the details, see if what you're saying is what you wanted to be saying.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they're normal to you because you've been dealing with them all your life.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“Every person in therapy has a love disorder.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

“Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little

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Popular quotes

“Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before – usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimble-riggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.”
― Flann O'Brien, quote from At Swim-Two-Birds

“Prove it!" she hissed. "Prove you are who you are!"
"We don't have time for this! You really want me to prove who I am?" he asked.
"Yes!" she challenged.
In answer, he took her in his arms, lifting her up and against the wall. He pressed his lips against hers, and with each kiss she could see into his mind, into his soul. She saw a year of hate...saw him alone, alienated, hurt. She had lied to him and had left him. With every kiss he made her see, made her feel...every emotion, every dream he had of her...every ounce of his wanting and his need...and his love...his all-consuming, life-affirming love for her. In the darkness they found each other again...and she kissed him back, so greedily and hungrily, she never wanted to stop kissing him...to feel his heart against hers, the two of them intertwined together, his hands in her hair, then down the small of her back. She wanted to cry from the overwhelming emotion that engulfed the two of them....
"Now do you belive me?" Jack asked huskily, pulling away from a moment so they could look into each other's eyes. Schuyler nodded, breathless. Jack. Every fiber of her being tingled with love and desire and remorse and forgiveness. Oh Jack...the love of her life, her sweet, her soul...”
― Melissa de la Cruz, quote from The Van Alen Legacy

“I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.”
― Malala Yousafzai, quote from I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

“Durch die Gitterfenster seiner Individualität starrt der Mensch hoffnungslos auf die Ringmauern der äußeren Umstände, bis der Tod kommt und ihn zu Heimkehr und Freiheit ruft …

Individualität!… Ach, was man ist, kann und hat, scheint arm, grau, unzulänglich und langweilig; was man aber nicht ist, nicht kann und nicht hat, das eben ist es, worauf man mit jenem sehnsüchtigen Neide blickt, der zur Liebe wird, weil er sich fürchtet, zum Haß zu werden.

Ich trage den Keim, den Ansatz, die Möglichkeit zu allen Befähigungen und Betätigungen der Welt in mir … Wo könnte ich sein, wenn ich nicht hier wäre! Wer, was, wie könnte ich sein, wenn ich nicht ich wäre, wenn diese meine persönliche Erscheinung mich nicht abschlösse und mein Bewußtsein von dem aller derer trennte, die nicht ich sind! Organismus! Blinde, unbedachte, bedauerliche Eruption des drängenden Willens! Besser, wahrhaftig, dieser Wille webt frei in raum- und zeitloser Nacht, als daß er in einem Kerker schmachtet, der von dem zitternden und wankenden Flämmchen des Intellektes notdürftig erhellt wird!”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

“And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don’t like to be reminded of how frail we are—how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended. So”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Sphere

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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