We don’t make a big fuss over Valentine’s Day around here, but I do think a lot about love. Here are some of my favorite love-themed blackout poems I’ve made matched with quotes from my commonplace book…
“There’s something about writing a book that feels like you’re writing love letters to one person.”
— Heather Havrilesky
“One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”
—W.S. Merwin
“A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another."
—Rebecca Solnit
“I have a friend who has never read a single word I have ever written. I love being with her.”
—Mary Ruefle
“Ah, love, Gromit. That's the biggest trap of all!”
—Wallace, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
“I don’t want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests.”
—Seymour, Ghost World
“Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. 'What? this person is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough?”
―Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“Whenever I wondered what Sara saw in me, and I wondered more than once, I always came back to the fact that she read everything, every spare moment. She was a junkie for the printed word. And, lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.”
—Steve Kloves’ screenplay adaptation of Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
“She knew me better than anyone else in the world. And still wanted to have lunch with me.”
—Julian Barnes, The Sense Of An Ending
“To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.”
—Iris Murdoch
”A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.”
—G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens
“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous, that you realize just how much you love them.”
—Agatha Christie, from my wife’s favorite book, An Autobiography
“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”
—W.H. Auden
“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”
—bell hooks
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
—John Williams, Stoner
“Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other.”
—Louis Lavelle
“Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain’s open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. … Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
—Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, A General Theory of Love
“For a long time after I got married, I used to have this vague idea that the purpose of marriage was for each partner to fill in what the other lacked. Lately though, after 25 years of marriage, I’ve come to see it differently, that marriage is perhaps rather an ongoing process of each partner’s exposing of what the other lacks….Finally, only the person himself can fill in what he is missing. It’s not something another person can do for you. And in order to do the filling in, you yourself have to discover the size and location of the hole.”
—Haruki Murakami
“No love is like / any other love / so it would be insane / to make a comparison.”
—Fiona Apple, “Ladies”
Hit me in the comments with your favorite words on love — essays, poems, books, songs, stories, etc. — I’ll take it all!
xoxo,
Austin
I’d forgotten about this poem, but saw it on Notes today:
The Teapot
“That morning I heard water being poured into a teapot.
The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound.
But all at once, I knew you loved me.
An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling.” - Robert Bly
“I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, ‘Put in some tooth twine.’ I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me. It had been a long search, but it was worth it.” E.B. White