Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do read more

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

In everything, satiety closely follows the greatest pleasures.

In everything, satiety closely follows the greatest pleasures.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the read more

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.

Yearn to understand first and to be understood second.

Yearn to understand first and to be understood second.

The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.

The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, read more

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

I like villains because there's something so attractive about a committed person -- they have a plan, an ideology, no read more

I like villains because there's something so attractive about a committed person -- they have a plan, an ideology, no matter how twisted. They're motivated.

It's not till sex has died out between a man and a woman that they can really love. And now read more

It's not till sex has died out between a man and a woman that they can really love. And now I mean affection. Now I mean to be fond of (as one is fond of oneself) --to hope, to be disappointed, to live inside the other heart. When I look back on the pain of sex, the love like a wild fox so ready to bite, the antagonism that sits like a twin beside love, and contrast it with affection, so deeply unrepeatable, of two people who have lived a life together (and of whom one must die) it's the affection I find richer. It's that I would have again. Not all those doubtful rainbow colors.