Personal Quotes

“Sometimes God closes doors that we, on our own, cannot.” ~ Just L (2008)

“I require a mature man with a high level of commitment. I desire a man who is loyal, honest, and possesses integrity especially when challenged with life’s difficult decisions. I want a real man who is genuine, has a sense of humor, and wants to participate in life’s adventure with a partner. I want to be a lover and an equal, not a ‘mommy,’ and certainly never a nag. I believe in the sacredness of love, and I do not easily give my heart away. Though once I do, I am ‘all in.’ I am not into wasting my time, and want a man who proves worthy of me — someone who is not scared of a lifetime of possibilities with one fabulous person. I also love fast cars, loud music, and travel, and will be forever young at heart… So hang on!” ~ Just L (Excerpt from my mission statement, 2009)

“Love is not always fireworks and shooting stars; sometimes it’s a simple understanding and trust between two people. BUT I SURE LIKE THE FIREWORKS!!!” ~ Just L (2010)

“There are moments in our lives when we are offered incredible gifts, and our only obligation is to accept that God knows our hearts and has listened to our deepest desires whispered in the darkest nights. So I remind you my beloved YEARN FOR the impossible.” ~ Just L (2010)

“When I love you….you may have it all; take it all.” ~ Just L (2010)

“Love until it hurts or no longer hurts, which ever takes longer.” ~ Just L (November 29, 2013)

“There are times when offering a little help with the simple things make an extraordinary difference in another’s life… Never underestimate the elegance of kindness.” ~ Just L (December 29, 2013)

“Being single is not a personality disorder.” ~ Just L (June 20, 2014)

“Do not underestimate the intensity of my quietness. My passion for you is perfectly comfortable inside my own skin. But oh how I love to feel yours.” ~ Just L (2015)

“Even if you have to wait a lifetime (or 50+ years), once you find that spark with the right one, all of your ‘ideas’ of happily ever after will fly out the window. After 1.5 years together, I no longer want perfect, I have, at last, found perfect for me. This could be my forever love. Perhaps we had to grow far away from each other to, at last, fearlessly come together (Tho’ everyone jokes that our paths have crossed a thousand times in twenty years). Our story doesn’t follow any of the rules, and yet our state of physical ease and freedom is equal to what simmers below the surface – fierce and fiery. In fact, I dare you to try and extinguish it. He’s inspired 100+ poems… Who does that to me? (Oh sure, I am the romantic, but I am also the realist… After all, flowery words are not real life.) This is real. And really quite beautiful.”  ~ Just L to girlfriends (About him, February 11, 2016, shopping for Valentine’s Day, a few days before he really proved me wrong.)

“Stop praying for a true love, if you are unprepared to love an imperfect person.”  ~ Just L (May 1, 2016) #abouthim

“Let us not compare our sadness. May we love each other through it much as we celebrate each other’s happiness without compare!” ~ Just L (May 14, 2016) Goddess Wisdom

“Guardedness is a companion that isn’t easy to break free from.” ~ Just L (June 3, 2016)

“Isn’t it ironic at the very moment in life I no longer cared what others thought and was ready to fully embrace my happiness, he started caring…” ~ Just L (#abouthim, June 3, 2016)

“You made your choice and now you have to live with it” is the stupidest advice ever. Remember YOUR happiness can be renegotiated every day! And, research on the cognitive effect shows that happiness tends to promote positive problem solving. In fact, happy people excel at solving problems they find interesting. ~ Just L (June 5, 2016) Goddess Wisdom

“I wish we were spending this weekend hiking a beautiful Oregon trail in the rain, returning to a hot shower with some Mr. Bubble, scrubbing off all of the mud while laughing. How can Mr. Bubble, his favorite, not  magically wash away everything bad between us?” ~ Just L (#abouthim, June 15, 2016)

“Not one of us is free of making mistakes in a relationship; however, we have to know how to recognize our own failures and fix them with love. The even greater challenge is to learn to allow the person you love the grace to come back from their mistakes.” ~ Just L (August 6, 2016)

Love only works when you both love each other with the same intensity. You fight to defend a lover, not to win one. If you do, it’s not love. ~ Just L (October 31, 2016) Goddess Wisdom

In love, a heart can never be stolen… It only goes where it wants to. ~ Just L (November 1, 2016) Goddess Wisdom

Wear the rose colored glasses and be fiercely kind. ~ Just L (January 3, 2017) New Year Resolution

It took only a second to feel the Truth between us.  It felt like a blast of destiny. ~ Just L (February 24, 2017)

He kept saying, “I’ve been single a long time…” as if that made him an expert on relationships. I couldn’t help but think, maybe that just makes you an expert at being single. ~ Just L (March 11, 2017)

You have to remember baby you are a writer and I am a drummer. Guitars and keyboards play a lot of notes. I keep the time. ~Just L (my love to me, May 9, 2017)

To love as big and wide as I do means I have decided in advance I am also prepared for the depth of pain that comes with it. But, I am never sorry… For if the strength of my love is matched only once in this life, it will last me a lifetime. ~Just L (September 3, 2017)

Chemistry is not the same as compatibility. Follow your heart, but take your brain with you. ~ Just L (April 7, 2018)

Favorite Quotes

As a hopeful romantic, logophile, and writer, I have collected quite a few quotes. Enjoy my favorites on love, life, and loss:

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” – eden ahbez

“I love you – those three words have my life in them.” – Alexandrea to Nicholas II

“I know there isn’t that much demand for blurry photographs taken while running; but you know, who cares the world is a playground… you know that when you are a kid but somewhere along the way everyone forgets it!” – Zooey Deschanel as Allison (Yes Man, 2008)

“We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.” – Walter Anderson

“They will whisper; “It’s not easy, it’s not easy.” But hold your ground. You will get through it.” – Tere Arigo

“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; — it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.” – Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)

“Heartbreak teaches you something about the world.” ~Annette Bening as Dorothea (20th Century Women, 2016)

“That’s the key to having it all: stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like. It’s true of the fall lines, and it’s true of relationships.” – Candice Bergen as Enid (Sex and the City S5, Ep5, 2002)

“Our lives are a collection of STORIES truths about who we are, what we believe, what we came from, how we struggle and how we are strong. When we can let go of what people think, and OWN our story, we gain access to our worthiness—the feeling that we are ENOUGH just as we are, and that we are worthy of LOVE and BELONGING.” ~Brené Brown

“LOVE: We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from the offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare. ~Brené Brown

“I am deeply in love with the independence that comes along with being selfish with myself and my heart, and refusing to rip it in half in order to share it with someone who might not be willing to rip theirs just as evenly for me.” – A.J. Burgos

“I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” – Leo Buscaglia

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” – Joseph Campbell

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

“I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens, only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.” – e.e. cummings

“What did you promise?

To follow my heart,

To follow the sun,

…And not to be worried when the tide goes out.” – Glenn Dakin

“There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.” – Salvador Dali

“A woman’s brain is a massively parallel super-computer and there is no way to express the emotional currents in her heart in such a recent invention as language.” – Writer known only as Dreamwalker

“The years teach much which the days never knew.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I think women love very hard…we love men, and we just love with everything we have.. And sometimes I don’t know that love is met with the type of dignity we wish it would be met with.” – Lady Gaga (From her healing with ex-fiancé, Taylor Kinney)

She adds in another interview, “My threshold for bullsh*\t with men is just — I don’t have one anymore. In relationships, you have to move together.”

“The mystery of what a couple *is*, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature — or for love, for that matter.” – Mavis Gallant

“A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise on your lips.” – Kahlil Gibran

“Ruin is a gift; it is the way to transformation.” – Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Love, Pray)

“Do NOT fall in love with men who cannot reciprocate your love. It only reenforces that you are unlovable.” – From the TV show Glee (November 2009)

“Unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.” – John Green

“Many mistakes but no regrets,” would be a wonderful way to end every relationship that has outlived its lessons.” – Randi Gunther, Ph.D. from When It’s Time to Let a Relationship Go

“Maybe that individual is amazing. Just not your amazing. When you find your amazing, they will think you are amazing, too. All of those things you did that were silly, rejected, or unappreciated, someone else is praying for.” – Steve Harvey (paraphrased)

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” – Ernest Hemingway

“There are beautiful flowers that are scentless and beautiful women that are unlovable.” – Houellé

“Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.” – Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.” – Erica Jong (How to Save Your Own Life, 1977)

“Tenderness is the repose of passion.” – Joseph Joubert

“What is it to be in love? Well, I’m in love, and it means you feel you have sailed into port. At the end of the road, after each day of the petty struggle for power and glory, I get to be with this marvelous human being whose company is continually interesting, whom I admire, who can speak the truth to me, who I am loyal to and fond of to an excessive degree, whom I crave being naked with, and who reciprocates these feelings.” – Garrison Keillor, writing as Mr. Blue on Salon

“Love chooses to believe the best about people. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to fill in the unknowns with negative assumptions. And when our worst hopes are proven to be true, love makes every effort to deal with them and move forward. As much as possible, love focuses on the positive.” – Stephen & Alex Kendrick (The Love Dare)

“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” – Soren Kierkegaard

“My love for you is past the mind, beyond my heart, and into my soul.” – Boris Kodjoe (Madea’s Family Reunion)

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” – Anne Lamott

“The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.” – Emil Ludwig

“We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.” – Bernard Malamud (The Natural)

“We rise and fall and light from dying embers
Remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.”
– Lin Manuel Miranda (from his sonnet read at the 2016 Tony Awards)

“If you are nothing more than a yes-girl there is no spark, no tension, no heat, no interplay. It’s boring. You become totally predictable and never challenge him. You become an accessory.” – Dr. Phil McGraw

“A woman asks little of love: only that she be able to feel like a heroine.” – Mignon McLaughlin (The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966)

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” – Thomas Merton

“Forgiveness is the economy of the heart…it saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.” – Hannah Moore (Practical Piety)

“A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.” – George Jean Nathan

“What passes for woman’s intuition is often nothing more than man’s transparency.” – George Jean Nathan

“Reality depends on what you are willing to imagine and allow.” – Tots Navarro

“In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man is.” – Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

“Dreams are necessary to life.” – Anaïs Nin

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” – Anaïs Nin

“I believe that every single event in life happens as an opportunity to choose love over fear.” – Oprah

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” – Blaise Pascal (inked on my side)

“Men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable – a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves.” – John Paul II (Faith and Reason)

“The strength of such a (mature) love emerges most clearly when the beloved stumbles, when his or her weaknesses or sins come into the open. One who truly loves does not then withdraw love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other’s shortcomings and faults, and without in the least approving of them. For the person as such never loses his/her essential value. The emotion which attaches to the value of the person is loyal.” – John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)

“If you love something, love it completely, cherish it, say it, but most importantly, show it. Life is finite and fragile, and just because something is there one day, it might not be the next. Never take that for granted. Say what you need to say, then say a little more. Say too much. Show too much. Love too much. Everything is temporary but love. Love outlives us all.” – R. Queen

“Be a good kisser. It might make your wife forget that you never take the trash out.” – Randy, age 8

“…. believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.” – Tom Robbins

“We pardon to the extent that we love.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

“I must learn to love the fool in me the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.” – Theodore Isaac Rubin

“Be Impeccable With Your Word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love. – Miguel Angel Ruiz (The Four Agreements)

“Let the beauty you love be what you do.” – Rumi

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.” – Madame de Stael

“If you smoke after sex, you’re doing it too fast.” – s.s.b-b (Love Blender Digest)

“I got a woman who I can’t stand to be two feet away from.” – Mark Wahlberg as Bobby Shafford (The Perfect Storm)

“…you undo me

completely

leaving me

senseless, wanting, aching.” – Star of David (Excerpt from “My Body Betrays Me,” Love Blender Digest, January 2009)

“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.” – From Anathem by Neal Stephenson

“She reached up and kissed him on the lips. It was a small kiss. It lasted only two or three seconds, just long enough to taste the future.”  – Francisco X. Stork, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors

“We don’t know who we are until we are connected to someone else. We are just better human beings when we are with the right person.” – Tara to Jax (Sons of Anarchy, Season 3 Premier)

“Marriage hath in it less of beauty but more of safety, than the single life; it hath more care, but less danger, it is more merry, and more sad; it is fuller of sorrows, and fuller of joys; it lies under more burdens, but it is supported by all the strengths of love and charity, and those burdens are delightful.” – Bishop Jeremy Taylor

“You don’t see why your world has no love to give, well, what goes around comes around.” – The Head And The Heart (All We Ever Knew, 2016)

“The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.” – Edward Thomas (1878- 1917)

“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Stupid people see beauty only in beautiful things.” – Oliviero Toscani quoting Dadaist Saying

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu

“If I ever lose someone for having too much depth, for having too much soul, for having standards too high, for dreaming too big, for putting the quality of my life before a career, for keeping it real, for loving too hard, for pushing them to see the grass is only green where you water it… Then the loss was not mine to begin with.” – Unknown

“You don’t get to choose, you just fall.” – Unknown

“Do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again?” – Unknown

“When a thing has served its purpose, it will go away. If holding on is disturbing your peace of mind, it makes sense to let go.” – Iyanla Vanzant

““Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.” – Nayyirah Waheed

“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?” – Oscar Wilde

“I’ve taken love heroin, and now I can’t ever have it again.” – William (Notting Hill, 1999)

“…Any true thing between two people is too rare to be normal. – Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)

Author’s Note: Quotes are in alphabetical order by author.