At the same time, the truth is that we are beloved, even in our current condition, by someone; we have loved and been loved. We have also known the abyss of love lost to death or rejection, and that it somehow leads to new life. We have been redeemed and saved by love, even as a few times we have been nearly destroyed, and worse, seen our children nearly destroyed. We are who we love, we are one, and we are autonomous.

Here is what I know of love: Love is the gas station and the fuel, the air and the water. You might as well give up on keeping the gas cap screwed on tight, keeping love at bay, staying armored or buttressed, because love will get in. It will wear you down. Love is ruthless, whether you notice this or not....It will win. It always does, at least in the long term...

Rilke wrote: "I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life's other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and

I have a quote taped to my office wall from an anonymous source that says, 'Love is hard. Love is ... seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.

Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays.

The point is the love story. We live in a love story in the midst of war.

Have you ever loved somebody, loved her completely, but had to end the relationship for life reasons?

I love you more than songs can say, but I can't keep running after yesterday...

He leaned toward her father. " 'Tis true, I am a murderer, a liar, and a thief. 'Tis equally true that I will use whatever monstrous talents I possess to keep your daughter at my side. You can take Avalene to a convent at the ends of the earth and I will find her and steal her away again. I will lie to God, himself, to free her. I will protect her with my life, and I will murder anyone who threatens her.

Dorothea, he said to himself, was for ever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool...

The calendar hath not an evil day For souls made one by love, and even death Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves While they two clasped each other, and foresaw No life apart.