essay in love quotes

Quotes from Essays in Love

Alain de Botton ·  211 pages

Rating: (14.7K votes)

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Must being in love always mean being in pain?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to an amoeba, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that it has no self-defined shape. It is my absurdist side that an absurdist person will draw out of me, and my seriousness that a serious person will evoke. If someone thinks I am shy, I will probably end up shy, if someone thinks me funny, I am likely to keep cracking jokes.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different places: that they had been different books for each of us. Might the same divergence not occur over a single love-line? I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air - and not knowing if any of them would get through.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost 'other half to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,’ wrote George Orwell,” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

About the author

Alain de Botton Born place: in Zurich, Switzerland See more on GoodReads

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Essays in Love  is a novel about two young people, who meet on an airplane between London and Paris and rapidly fall in love. The structure of the story isn’t unusual, but what lends the book its interest is the extraordinary depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date. Another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say ‘I love you’. There’s an essay on how uncomfortable it can be to disagree with a lover’s taste in shoes and a lengthy discussion about the role of guilt in love.

The book is an intriguing blend of novel and non-fiction. As in a novel, there are characters and realistic settings, but these are blended in with a host of more abstract ideas. The book has attracted a particular following among those who have recently fallen in love ­- or come out of a relationship.

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Essays About Love: 20 Intriguing Ideas for Students

Love can make a fascinating essay topic, but sometimes finding the perfect topic idea is challenging. Here are 20 of the best essays about love.

Writers have often explored the subject of love and what it means throughout history. In his book Essays in Love , Alain de Botton creates an in-depth essay on what love looks like, exploring a fictional couple’s relationship while highlighting many facts about love. This book shows how much there is to say about love as it beautifully merges non-fiction with fiction work.

The New York Times  published an entire column dedicated to essays on modern love, and many prize-winning reporters often contribute to the collection. With so many published works available, the subject of love has much to be explored.

If you are going to write an essay about love and its effects, you will need a winning topic idea. Here are the top 20 topic ideas for essays about love. These topics will give you plenty to think about and explore as you take a stab at the subject that has stumped philosophers, writers, and poets since the dawn of time.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

1. Outline the Definition of Love

2. describe your favorite love story, 3. what true love looks like, 4. discuss how human beings are hard-wired for love, 5. explore the different types of love, 6. determine the true meaning of love, 7. discuss the power of love, 8. do soul mates exist, 9. determine if all relationships should experience a break-up, 10. does love at first sight exist, 11. explore love between parents and children, 12. discuss the disadvantages of love, 13. ask if love is blind, 14. discuss the chemical changes that love causes, 15. outline the ethics of love, 16. the inevitability of heartbreak, 17. the role of love in a particular genre of literature, 18. is love freeing or oppressing, 19. does love make people do foolish things, 20. explore the theme of love from your favorite book or movie.

Defining love may not be as easy as you think. While it seems simple, love is an abstract concept with multiple potential meanings. Exploring these meanings and then creating your own definition of love can make an engaging essay topic.

To do this, first, consider the various conventional definitions of love. Then, compare and contrast them until you come up with your own definition of love.

One essay about love you could tackle is describing and analyzing a favorite love story. This story could be from a fiction tale or real life. It could even be your love story.

As you analyze and explain the love story, talk about the highs and lows of love. Showcase the hard and great parts of this love story, then end the essay by talking about what real love looks like (outside the flowers and chocolates).

This essay will explore what true love looks like. With this essay idea, you could contrast true love with the romantic love often shown in movies. This contrast would help the reader see how true love looks in real life.

An essay about what true love looks like could allow you to explore this kind of love in many different facets. It would allow you to discuss whether or not someone is, in fact, in true love. You could demonstrate why saying “I love you” is not enough through the essay.

There seems to be something ingrained in human nature to seek love. This fact could make an interesting essay on love and its meaning, allowing you to explore why this might be and how it plays out in human relationships.

Because humans seem to gravitate toward committed relationships, you could argue that we are hard-wired for love. But, again, this is an essay option that has room for growth as you develop your thoughts.

There are many different types of love. For example, while you can have romantic love between a couple, you may also have family love among family members and love between friends. Each of these types of love has a different expression, which could lend itself well to an interesting essay topic.

Writing an essay that compares and contrasts the different types of love would allow you to delve more deeply into the concept of love and what makes up a loving relationship.

What does love mean? This question is not as easy to answer as you might think. However, this essay topic could give you quite a bit of room to develop your ideas about love.

While exploring this essay topic, you may discover that love means different things to different people. For some, love is about how someone makes another person feel. To others, it is about actions performed. By exploring this in an essay, you can attempt to define love for your readers.

What can love make people do? This question could lend itself well to an essay topic. The power of love is quite intense, and it can make people do things they never thought they could or would do.

With this love essay, you could look at historical examples of love, fiction stories about love relationships, or your own life story and what love had the power to do. Then, at the end of your essay, you can determine how powerful love is.

The idea of a soul mate is someone who you are destined to be with and love above all others. This essay topic would allow you to explore whether or not each individual has a soul mate.

If you determine that they do, you could further discuss how you would identify that soul mate. How can you tell when you have found “the one” right for you? Expanding on this idea could create a very interesting and unique essay.

Break-ups seem inevitable, and strong relationships often come back together afterward. Yet are break-ups truly inevitable? Or are they necessary to create a strong bond? This idea could turn into a fascinating essay topic if you look at both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, you could argue that the break-up experience shows you whether or not your relationship can weather difficult times. On the other hand, you could argue that breaking up damages the trust you’re working to build. Regardless of your conclusion, you can build a solid essay off of this topic idea.

Love, at first sight is a common theme in romance stories, but is it possible? Explore this idea in your essay. You will likely find that love, at first sight, is nothing more than infatuation, not genuine love.

Yet you may discover that sometimes, love, at first sight, does happen. So, determine in your essay how you can differentiate between love and infatuation if it happens to you. Then, conclude with your take on love at first sight and if you think it is possible.

The love between a parent and child is much different than the love between a pair of lovers. This type of love is one-sided, with care and self-sacrifice on the parent’s side. However, the child’s love is often unconditional.

Exploring this dynamic, especially when contrasting parental love with romantic love, provides a compelling essay topic. You would have the opportunity to define this type of love and explore what it looks like in day-to-day life.

Most people want to fall in love and enjoy a loving relationship, but does love have a downside? In an essay, you can explore the disadvantages of love and show how even one of life’s greatest gifts is not without its challenges.

This essay would require you to dig deep and find the potential downsides of love. However, if you give it a little thought, you should be able to discuss several. Finally, end the essay by telling the reader whether or not love is worth it despite the many challenges.

Love is blind is a popular phrase that indicates love allows someone not to see another person’s faults. But is love blind, or is it simply a metaphor that indicates the ability to overlook issues when love is at the helm.

If you think more deeply about this quote, you will probably determine that love is not blind. Rather, love for someone can overshadow their character flaws and shortcomings. When love is strong, these things fall by the wayside. Discuss this in your essay, and draw your own conclusion to decide if love is blind.

When someone falls in love, their body feels specific hormonal and chemical changes. These changes make it easier to want to spend time with the person. Yet they can be fascinating to study, and you could ask whether or not love is just chemical reactions or something more.

Grab a science book or two and see if you can explore these physiological changes from love. From the additional sweating to the flushing of the face, you will find quite a few chemical changes that happen when someone is in love.

Love feels like a positive emotion that does not have many ethical concerns, but this is not true. Several ethical questions come from the world of love. Exploring these would make for an interesting and thoughtful essay.

For example, you could discuss if it is ethically acceptable to love an object or even oneself or love other people. You could discuss if it is appropriate to enter into a physical relationship if there is no love present or if love needs to come first. There are many questions to explore with this love essay.

If you choose to love someone, is heartbreak inevitable? This question could create a lengthy essay. However, some would argue that it is because either your object of affection will eventually leave you through a break-up or death.

Yet do these actions have to cause heartbreak, or are they simply part of the process? Again, this question lends itself well to an essay because it has many aspects and opinions to explore.

Literature is full of stories of love. You could choose a genre, like mythology or science fiction, and explore the role of love in that particular genre. With this essay topic, you may find many instances where love is a vital central theme of the work.

Keep in mind that in some genres, like myths, love becomes a driving force in the plot, while in others, like historical fiction, it may simply be a background part of the story. Therefore, the type of literature you choose for this essay would significantly impact the way your essay develops.

Most people want to fall in love, but is love freeing or oppressing? The answer may depend on who your loved ones are. Love should free individuals to authentically be who they are, not tie them into something they are not.

Yet there is a side of love that can be viewed as oppressive, deepening on your viewpoint. For example, you should stay committed to just that individual when you are in a committed relationship with someone else. Is this freeing or oppressive? Gather opinions through research and compare the answers for a compelling essay.

You can easily find stories of people that did foolish things for love. These stories could translate into interesting and engaging essays. You could conclude the answer to whether or not love makes people do foolish things.

Your answer will depend on your research, but chances are you will find that, yes, love makes people foolish at times. Then you could use your essay to discuss whether or not it is still reasonable to think that falling in love is a good thing, although it makes people act foolishly at times.

Most fiction works have love in them in some way. This may not be romantic love, but you will likely find characters who love something or someone.

Use that fact to create an essay. Pick your favorite story, either through film or written works, and explore what love looks like in that work. Discuss the character development, storyline, and themes and show how love is used to create compelling storylines.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

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Essays in Love (On Love) by Alain de Botton

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B : weaknesses galore, but clever enough, with his trademark digressions, that we do recommend it

See our review for fuller assessment.

   From the Reviews : "Alain de Botton picks up the torch, so to speak, more or less where Stendhal left off. De Botton�s On Love reads as if Stendhal had lived into the �90s, survived modern critical theory (as he clearly has), thought it was funny (as he likely would have), but retained a novelist�s sympathy for the impulse -- which he shared -- to deconstruct and to dissect in search of some higher understanding." - Francine Prose, The New Republic "The result is something like La Rochefoucauld�s maxims crossed with Adolphe, with jokes and against a background of luggage reclaim areas and breakfast cereal packets. (...) Ingeniously pinpointed mundane details stop the novel from getting too abstract. It is witty, funny, sophisticated, neatly tied up, and full of wise and illuminating insights." - Gabriele Annan, The Spectator Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

       Baby-faced in appearance, Gallic in name and often in attitude, English Wunderkind De Botton has achieved notable (and somewhat galling) success at an early age, with five books to his name before he turned thirty. On Love was his first novel ( Essays in Love , as the British original had it) -- though there are also similarly themed later novels, Kiss & Tell and The Romantic Movement . Love preoccupies the young author, as well it might, and though a big subject to tackle, De Botton tackles well.        The story of this novel is simplicity itself: a love affair, from its very beginning to its very end. De Botton's narrator describes falling in love with Chloe, being in love with her, and then getting over her. An old story, the twist here is in how De Botton relates it, dwelling and (over)analyzing each and every aspect, and looking to see greater truths in them.        De Botton is intelligent, and he chooses to approach his book cleverly. Clever and intelligent do not always mix, but De Botton manages quite well. Each relatively short chapter is further divided into numbered paragraphs, each a brief point (or often a brief digression) illuminating various aspects of the love between Chloe and the narrator -- and love in general. Young, well-educated, fairly well to do, neither is completely sympathetic. Part of De Botton's success is that he shows us everyday love in characters who are not particularly appealing. He revels in considering all aspects of love, including -- or rather, especially -- the mundane and everyday and trivial. There are charts and pictures and diagrams, and some of it is too cute and forced, but overall it is indeed a clever little book.        It is a young author's book, and we occasionally grimace at some of what De Botton tries -- but it is a difficult subject to handle well. Other people's love affairs are often not the most interesting of subjects, especially when one deals with the everyday minutiae, but for most of the book De Botton keeps us hooked with his interesting thoughts on love's many aspects. The almost banal affair itself does stifle the narrative (De Botton's strength is certainly essayistic, which is why his Proust book is far superior to the novels), but there are enough well-conceived flights of fancy to keep the reader amused.        In her review Francine Prose makes particular note of the chapter entitled Marxism , where the Marxism in question is not Karl's, but rather the Groucho's who didn't want to belong to any club that would have him. It is that sort of cleverness that fills the book, and those who are put off by it should turn elsewhere. Prose is correct in expecting that those who can't appreciate this notion (which De Botton handles very cleverly) would not enjoy the book. We would argue that the book is, on some level, even more demanding than that. De Botton is intelligent, and the book is rich in allusion and reference. While most of this is enjoyable, it is perhaps the place where he truly goes wrong: the references are too clever for the quality of his narrative (he is not quite up to snuff in the story-telling department yet), and so readers are left either disappointed by the writing or confused by the references.        We still recommend this book rather highly, as an interesting failed effort, with enough quality, humor, and cleverness (and love-talk !) to satisfy. Like all of De Botton's book, it makes one think -- though without being overly taxing.

About the Author :

       English author Alain de Botton was born in Switzerland in 1969 and educated at Cambridge.

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Joan Didion, in her own words: 23 of the best quotes

The Californian author became the ultimate literary celebrity for her journalistic style. Here are some of her best quotes on writing, love, ageing and fear, plus a selection of essays

Joan Didion, who has died aged 87 , inspired writers and readers for decades. Her journalism, memoirs, and cultural and political commentary made her a unique chronicler of 20th-century culture.

Here are 23 quotes that encapsulate her writing:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. – The White Album (1979)

Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. – Why I Write (essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1976)

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. – Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power (essay originally published in Vogue in 1961)

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from. – A Book of Common Prayer (1977)

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers. – The White Album (1979)

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go. – a The Paris Review interview (1978)

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which explores grief following the death of her husband

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. – On keeping a notebook, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked door. The fear is for what is still to be lost. – Blue Nights (2011)

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. — Where I Was From (2003)

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

On literature and writing

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

You get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something. – The Paris Review interview (2006).

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. – The White Album (1979)

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” – UC Riverside commencement address (1975).

Which are your favourite Didion quotes or books? In what ways did her work inspire you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

• Joan Didion
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18 Of The Most Illuminating Literary Passages On Love, Life, And Romance By Beau Taplin

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=484337

I can’t remember exactly when I first stumbled upon Beau Taplin’s writing. I suppose it was when I found myself in a used bookstore a few weeks ago with a copy of  Hunting Season in my hands. Then I remembered, later, a friend from Australia had told me some time ago when we were in Nicaragua that he was one of her favorites. Beau’s work largely exists online, on posts that get reblogged thousands of times and on his website – the only place you can buy copies of his books. Here are a select few of some of the most beautiful and illuminating passages from his work.

“ Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a forest—thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the under wood. You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated. ”

“ often, when we have a crush, when we lust for a person, we see only a small percentage of who they really are. the rest we make up for ourselves. rather than listen, or learn, we smother them in who we imagine them to be, what we desire for ourselves, we create little fantasies of people and let them grow in our hearts. and this is where the relationship fails. in time, the fiction we scribble onto a person falls away, the lies we tell ourselves unravel and soon the person standing in front of you is almost unrecognizable, you are now complete strangers in your own love. and what a terrible shame it is. my advice: pay attention to the small details of people, you will learn that the universe is far more spectacular an author than we could ever hope to be. ”, human beings are made of water–-, we were not designed to hold ourselves together, rather run freely like oceans like rivers, “ one day, whether you are 14, 28 or 65, you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. however, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find – is they are not always with whom we spend our lives. ”, “ home is not where you are from, it is where you belong. some of us travel the whole world to find it. others, find it in a person.”, “ it’s 4am and i can’t remember how your voice sounds anymore. ”, “ it’s strange how your childhood sort of feels like forever. then suddenly you’re sixteen and the world becomes an hourglass and you’re watching the sand pile up at the wrong end. and you’re thinking of how when you were just a kid, your heartbeat was like a kick drum at a rock show, and now it’s just a time bomb ticking out. and it’s sad. and you want to forget about dying. but mostly you just want to forget about saying goodbye. ”, “ there was never going to be an “us” because you wanted to be missed more than you wanted to be loved. ”, “ it is a frightening thought, that in one fraction of a moment you can fall in the kind of love that takes a lifetime to get over. ”, “ the one thing i know for sure is that feelings are rarely mutual, so when they are, drop everything, forget belongings and expectations, forget the games, the two days between texts, the hard to gets because this is it, this is what the entire world is after and you’ve stumbled upon it by chance, by accident – so take a deep breath, take a step forward, now run, collide like planets in the system of a dying sun, embrace each other with both arms and let all the rules, the opinions and common sense crash down around you. because this is love kid, and it’s all yours. believe me, you’re in for one hell of a ride, after all – this is the one thing i know for sure. ”, “ the single greatest thing about love, in my experience, is the way it is doomed to pain and loss from its onset. whether it is the spouse that outlives their lover, or loses them to another, there is no escaping that most solemn of inevitabilities. that two people can commit themselves to all this sadness and heartache in the name of such brief happiness, the warm touch of familiar skin, the unrivalled pleasantness in waking up beside the same person you spent the entire night with in your dreams, is all the proof i need that insanity exists, and it is fucking beautiful. ”, “ it’s you. it’s been you for as long as i can remember. everyone else has just been another failed attempt at perfecting the art of pretending you’re not. i miss you. ”, “ i want somebody with a sharp intellect and a heart from hell. somebody with eyes like starfire and a mouth with a kiss like a bottomless well. but mostly i just want someone who will love me. when i do not know how to love myself. ”, “ do not call me perfect, a lie is never a compliment. call me an erratic damaged and insecure mess. then tell me that you love me for it. ”, “ the hours between 12am and 6am have a funny habit of making you feel like you’re either on top of the world, or under it. ”, “ my heart beats in almosts. it’s constantly in pursuit of those whom it desires but the moment it comes too close, it stops, turns, and bolts in the other direction. i hold onto what makes me miserable and i let the good things go. i’m self destructive.” i said. “it’s the way i’ve always been.”

“and why do you think that is” 

“because it’s simpler to destroy something you love,” i said. 
“than it is to watch it leave. ”, “ i just want to be the person you miss at 3am. ”, “ she was unstoppable. not because she did not have failures or doubts, but because she continued on despite them. ”, for more from koty follow her on facebook ., koty neelis.

Former senior staff writer and producer at Thought Catalog.

Keep up with Koty on Twitter

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50 Inspirational Quotes on Writing

By barnes & noble press /, january 4, 2021 at 3:00 pm.

It’s a new year and, therefore, we want to help kick it off right with a collection of our favorite inspirational quotes on writing! We always start a new year with resolutions, but often it’s hard to stick with our goals. Certainly, that’s where we can come in 🙂

Above all, we hope these 50 Inspirational Quotes on Writing will keep you motivated and energized throughout 2021.

Inspirational Quotes on Writing: Imagination

2. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” –  William Wordsworth

3. “The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

4. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” –  Joan Didion

5. “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream by night.” – Edgar Allan Poe

6. “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” –  Gustav Flaubert

7. “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and look at it, until it shines.” –  Emily Dickinson

8. “That’s what you’re looking for as a writer when you’re working. You’re looking for your own freedom.” –  Philip Roth

9. “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” –  George Bernard Shaw

10. “Creativity is a combination of discipline and childlike spirit.” –  Robert Greene

11. “Writing is the painting of the voice.” –  Voltaire

12. “It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” –  Paulo Coelho

13. “I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere and it can do anything.” –  Alice Walker

Inspirational Quotes on Writing: Motivation

14. “Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself… it’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless.” – Harper Lee

15. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” –  Henry David Thoreau

16. “There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.” –  Raymond Carver

17. “Keep asking questions because people will always want to know the answer. Open with a question and don’t answer it until the end.” –  Lee Child

18. “But when people say, did you always want to be a writer? I have to say no! I always was a write.” –  Ursula K. Le Guin

19. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” –  Maya Angelou

20. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” –  Margaret Atwood

21. “You should write stories because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” –  Annie Proulx

23. “If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.” –  Terry Brooks

24. “If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.” –  H.G. Wells

25. “Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” –  Tom Stoppard

26. “The secret of it all is to write… without waiting for a fit time or place.” –  Walt Whitman

27. “No one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.” –  Charles de Lint

28. “Successful writing is one part inspiration and two parts sheer stubbornness.” –  Gillian Flynn

30. “As a writer, you should not judge. You should understand.” –  Ernest Hemingway

31. “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it.” – Beverly Cleary

32. “When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can’t depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus.”  Mark Twain

33. “Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Make some light.” –  Kate DiCamillo

Inspirational Quotes on Writing: Process

34. “A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.” –  Junot Diaz

35. “The first draft is you just telling yourself the story.” –  Terry Pratchett

36. “Write a page a day. Only 300 words and in a year you have written a novel.” –  Stephen King

37. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” –  Agatha Christie

38. “The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.” –  Donna Tart

39. “Writing is an act of faith, not a grammar trick.” –  E.B. White

40. “Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.” –  Phyllis Whitney

41. “The first draft is a skeleton. Just bare bones. The rest of the story comes later with revising.” –  Judy Bloom

42. “When you are describing a shape, or sound, or tint, don’t state the matter plainly, but put it in a hint. And learn to look at all things with a sort of mental squint.” –  Lewis Carroll

43. “You may not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult

44. “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” –  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

45. “The secret to editing your work is simple: You need to become its reader instead of its writer.” –  Zadie Smith

46. “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” –  Shannon Hale

47. “Don’t labor over a little cameo work in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.” –  Joyce Carol Oates

48. “If you fall in love with the vision and not your words, the rewriting will become easier.” –  Nora DeLoach

49. “Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff clears the way for good, or forms a base on which to build something better.” –  Jennifer Egan

50. “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” –  Ray Bradbury

To sum up, write it all down this year. After that, visit BNPress.com to become a published author! Importantly, we have plenty of tools to help new authors. From trusted partners to assist with editing, formatting, or design, to marketing and promotions. Each step of the way, we will be there to help.

And check out more from the B&N Press Blog:

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Essay on Love for Students and Children

500+ words essay on love.

Love is the most significant thing in human’s life. Each science and every single literature masterwork will tell you about it. Humans are also social animals. We lived for centuries with this way of life, we were depended on one another to tell us how our clothes fit us, how our body is whether healthy or emaciated. All these we get the honest opinions of those who love us, those who care for us and makes our happiness paramount.

What is Love?

Love is a set of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs with strong feelings of affection. So, for example, a person might say he or she loves his or her dog, loves freedom, or loves God. The concept of love may become an unimaginable thing and also it may happen to each person in a particular way.

Love has a variety of feelings, emotions, and attitude. For someone love is more than just being interested physically in another one, rather it is an emotional attachment. We can say love is more of a feeling that a person feels for another person. Therefore, the basic meaning of love is to feel more than liking towards someone.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Need of Love

We know that the desire to love and care for others is a hard-wired and deep-hearted because the fulfillment of this wish increases the happiness level. Expressing love for others benefits not just the recipient of affection, but also the person who delivers it. The need to be loved can be considered as one of our most basic and fundamental needs.

One of the forms that this need can take is contact comfort. It is the desire to be held and touched. So there are many experiments showing that babies who are not having contact comfort, especially during the first six months, grow up to be psychologically damaged.

Significance of Love

Love is as critical for the mind and body of a human being as oxygen. Therefore, the more connected you are, the healthier you will be physically as well as emotionally. It is also true that the less love you have, the level of depression will be more in your life. So, we can say that love is probably the best antidepressant.

It is also a fact that the most depressed people don’t love themselves and they do not feel loved by others. They also become self-focused and hence making themselves less attractive to others.

Society and Love

It is a scientific fact that society functions better when there is a certain sense of community. Compassion and love are the glue for society. Hence without it, there is no feeling of togetherness for further evolution and progress. Love , compassion, trust and caring we can say that these are the building blocks of relationships and society.

Relationship and Love

A relationship is comprised of many things such as friendship , sexual attraction , intellectual compatibility, and finally love. Love is the binding element that keeps a relationship strong and solid. But how do you know if you are in love in true sense? Here are some symptoms that the emotion you are feeling is healthy, life-enhancing love.

Love is the Greatest Wealth in Life

Love is the greatest wealth in life because we buy things we love for our happiness. For example, we build our dream house and purchase a favorite car to attract love. Being loved in a remote environment is a better experience than been hated even in the most advanced environment.

Love or Money

Love should be given more importance than money as love is always everlasting. Money is important to live, but having a true companion you can always trust should come before that. If you love each other, you will both work hard to help each other live an amazing life together.

Love has been a vital reason we do most things in our life. Before we could know ourselves, we got showered by it from our close relatives like mothers , fathers , siblings, etc. Thus love is a unique gift for shaping us and our life. Therefore, we can say that love is a basic need of life. It plays a vital role in our life, society, and relation. It gives us energy and motivation in a difficult time. Finally, we can say that it is greater than any other thing in life.

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• French Vocabulary

34 Beautifully Romantic French Love Quotes

With its world-famous wine, picturesque countryside, and cobblestone sidewalks, France is the perfect romantic setting. In a setting like this, it makes sense that French writers would frequently get carried away with descriptions of l’amour. French is the language of love, of course. From Antoine De Saint-Exupéry to Victor Hugo, here are 32 of the best French love quotes from French writers, poets, and historical figures.

“Aimer, ce n’est pas se regarder l’un l’autre, c’est regarder ensemble dans la même direction.”

– Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Translation: To love is not to look at each other, it is to look together in the same direction.

This quote perfectly expresses the difference between infatuation and love. Love is going forward together through decisions, changes and challenges, not just gazing into eachothers eyes. Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, (1900-1944) is the author of the famous fable Le Petit Prince.

Another beautiful quote from Saint-Exupéry is:

“On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Translation: One sees well with the heart.

While many people may tell you to look at love logically, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s message is to go by what your heart tells you. Following your inner self is indeed oftentimes best.

“Il n’y a qu’un bonheur dans la vie, c’est d’aimer et d’être aimé.”

– George Sand

Translation: There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who went by the pen name George Sand, was a French Novelist, journalist and memorist. She used the pen name George Sand, since male writers were more respected and likely to be published than female writers. In this quote, George Sand states simply the truth that love is what makes life so special. Not only loving but being loved in return is a pure and wonderful happiness that should be cherished.

“C’est cela l’amour, tout donner, tout sacrifier sans espoir de retour.”

– Albert Camus

Translation: This is love, giving it one’s all, sacrificing everything without hope of it being returned.

Albert Camus, writer of famous novels such as The Stranger , was an absurdist writer and philosopher. Camus was no stranger to love, having multiple wives and mistresses and even gaining a reputation as a womanizer. Even so, this quotation from Camus is a perfect expression of the sacrifice and act of faith love is.

“L’amour est comme le vent, nous ne savons pas d’où il vient.”

– Honoré de Balzac

Translation: Love is like the wind, nobody knows where it comes from.

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright born in the city of Tour in 1799. He was known for plays like Le Pere Goriot and publishing short stories under a collection called La Comédie humaine. Balzac exchanged letters with his love, Ewelina Hańska, for 15 years. This famous quote resonates with many who find that love can be unexpected and arrives at strange times, like a sudden gust of wind.

“L’amour est la poésie des sens.”

Translation: Love is poetry of the senses.

Poetry is a beautiful way of describing the feeling of being in love.

Balzac also wrote:

“La passion est toute l’humanité, sans elle, la religion, l’histoire, le roman, l’art seraient inutiles.”

Translation: Passion is in all humanity; without it, religion, history, literature, and art would be rendered useless.

Only a playwright like Honoré de Balzac could make such a dramatic statement. Indeed, it is true that passion and love run the world.

“L’esprit s’enrichit de ce qu’il reçoit, le cœur de ce qu’il donne.”

– Victor Hugo

Translation: The spirit enriches with what it receives, the heart with what it gives.

This beautiful quote was penned by no other than Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo lived from 1802-1885, writing abundantly into the romantic era. He is known for a multitude of works, from Les Miserables to The Hunchback of Notre-Dam. His enchanting views on love still inspire many.

“La vie est une fleur dont l’amour est le miel.”

Translation: Life is a flower and love is the honey.

Hugo was known for his romantic and poetic ideals.

He also was quoted as saying:

“Aimer, c’est vivre; aimer, c’est voir; aimer, c’est être.”

Translation: Love, it is life; love, it is sight; love, is to be.

This simple quote is dear to many; it so elegantly states how love is essential to being.

“Il faut s’aimer, et puis il faut se le dire, et puis il faut se l’écrire, et puis il faut se baiser sur la bouche, sur les yeux et ailleurs.”

Translation: We must love, and tell, and then write each other about it, then we must kiss each other’s mouth, and eyes, and elsewhere.

In this famous quote, Hugo poetically states that we should express our love every chance we get.

“Et c’est parfois dans un regard, dans un sourire que sont cachés les mots qu’on n’a jamais su dire.”

– Yves Duteil

Translation: And it is sometimes in a look or in a smile that hides the words that we never knew how to say.

Yves Duteil, a singer-songwriter from Neuilly-sur-Seine, penned these beautiful lyrics into his famous 1981 love song, “Les Choses qu’on ne dit pas”. 

“Oh ! si tu pouvais lire dans mon coeur, tu verrais la place où je t’ai mise!”

– Gustave Flaubert

Translation: Oh! If you could read my heart, you would see the place that I keep you!

Gustave Flaubert, (1821-1880), was a novelist from Rouen, known for novels like Madame Bovary and for influencing the rise of literary realism in France. This poetic and fascinating line is about thinking of someone fondly, something we can all relate to.

“Entre deux cœurs qui s’aiment, nul besoin de paroles.”

– Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Translation: Between two hearts in love, no words are needed.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 1786-1859, was a poet and novelist. She perfectly understood the power and simplicity of love in this quote, where she says that no communication is really needed when two people s’aiment.

“Quand il me prend dans les bras / Il me parle tout bas / Je vois la vie en rose.”

– Edith Piaf (La vie en rose)

Translation: When he holds me in his arms, and speaks to me softly, I see life through rose-colored glasses.

The singer and cabaret performer Ediath Piaf, (1915-1963) sings these heartfelt lyrics in her famous song, La Vie en Rose. A vibrant woman who had been through many love affairs and heartbreaks, she sang from true experience. Indeed, being in love makes everything seem wonderful.

“Quand on est aimé on ne doute de rien. Quand on aime, on doute de tout.”

Translation: Those who are loved, doubt nothing. Those who love, doubt everything

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, 1873-1954 was a nobel-peace nominated writer. She was also known as a mime, journalist, and artist. She expresses in this wise quote that being loved feels secure and comfortable while giving love to others can feel risky and uncertain.

“On n’aime que ce qu’on ne possède pas tout entier.”

– Marcel Proust

Translation: We love only what we do not wholly possess

Marcel Proust (1871-1922), penned the major novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. This quote resembles the English expression: you always want what you can’t have.

“La vie est un sommeil, l’amour en est le rêve.”

– Alfred de Musset

Translation: Life is a sleep, and love is a dream.

Alfred de Musset, 1810-1857, was a dramatist known for his poetry, plays, and successful novel La Confession d’un enfant du siècle.

“J’entends ta voix dans tous les bruits du monde.”

– Paul Éluard

Translation: I hear your voice in all the world’s noise.

One of the founders of the surrealist movement in France, this quote perfectly demonstrates Paul Eluard’s, (1895-1952), elegant and heartfelt writing style. 

“Je viens du ciel et les étoiles entre elles ne parlent que de toi.”

– Francis Cabrel

Translation: I come from heaven and the stars, they can’t stop talking about you.

Franci Cabrel voiced these famous lyrics into his song, Petite Marie in 1977. These romantic lyrics show a deep admiration for the subject of his song. 

“Elle avait dans les yeux, la force de son coeur.”

– Charles Baudelaire

Translation: She had in her eyes, the force of her heart.

Charles Baudelaire was a poet and essayist. He was also one of the first translators of Edgar Allen Poe. We can all relate to seeing someone’s emotions just by looking into their eyes.

“Il n’est rien de réel que le rêve et l’amour.”

– Anna de Noailles

Translation: There is nothing real but dreams and love.

Indeed, oftentimes the power of love makes the rest of the world feel pointless. This line was written by Anna de Noailles, (1876-1933), a Romanian-French writer.

“Je t’aime plus qu’hier moins que demain.”

– Rosemonde Gérard

Translation: I have loved you more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Rosemonde Gérard, (1866-1953), was a poet and playwright. This clever way of hinting that his love was ever increasing is one of his most famous lines.

“Mais ce qu’a lié l’amour même, le temps ne peut le délier.”

– Germain Nouveau

Translation: But what love has bound together, time cannot unbind.

Germain Nouveau, (1851-1920) was a French poet. This hopeful quote suggests that no matter how long two are separated, the love between them can’t be undone. This is a perfect quote to reflect on especially during quarantine, when many people are apart from their loved ones.

“L’amour fait les plus grandes douceurs et les plus sensibles infortunes de la vie”.

– Madeleine de Scudery

Translation: Love makes life’s sweetest pleasures and worst misfortunes.

Madeleine de Scudery, who lived a long one hundred years from 1601-1701, was a French writer known for her unusually extensive knowledge of ancient history. This quote keeps it real by recognizing that love can come with heartbreak. Nonetheless, love is worth the potential pain.

“L’on est bien faible quand on est amoureux.”

– Madame de Lafayette

Translation: One is weak when they are in love.

Madame de Lafayette (1634-1693) was a classic French writer. Lafayette is the author of La Princesse de Clèves, an incredibly significant novel as it was the first historical novel in France and one of the earliest novels in literature.

“Amour veut tout sans nombre, amour n’a point de loi.”

– Pierre de Ronsard

Translation: Love wants everything without condition, love has no law

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), was called the ‘king of poets’ in his time and it’s easy to see why with his words on a lawless romance.

“J’ai souvent souffert, je me suis trompé quelquefois; mais j’ai aimé. C’est moi qui ai vécu, et mon orgueil et mon ennui.”

Translation: I have suffered often, I have sometimes made mistakes, but I loved. It is I who has lived, and not a fictitious being created by my pride and my boredom.

Alfred de Musset, (1810-1856) was a dramatist, poet, and novelist. This is the perfect quote to describe how love is essential to living, and worth any amount of pain it may bring.

“Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”

– Blaise Pascal

Translation: The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know.

Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662) was known as a child-prodigy turned French mathematician as well as a philosopher and a writer. Even though math involves reason and logic, he was wise to know that the human heart always has different plans.

“L’amour c’est être stupide ensemble.”

– Paul Valéry

Translation: Love is to be stupid together.

Paul Valéry, (1871-1945) was a french poet and fiction writer. Valéry’s fresh take on love is so relatable.

“L’amour est une tragédie pour ceux qui ressentent et une comédie pour ceux qui pensent.”

Translation: Love is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

The world may not know what to make of the potentially naive decisions you make while you’re in love. In this quote, it’s clear as to why. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who went by the pen name, Molière, was a 17th century playwright.

“L’amour est l’emblème de l’éternité, il confond toute la notion de temps, efface toute la mémoire d’un commencement, toute la crainte d’une extrémité.”

– Madame de Staël

Translation: I have loved to the point of madness. That which some call madness, but which to me, is the only way to love.

Madame de Staël, (1634-1693), was a political theorist, intellect, and visionary of her time. Her writing and ideas contributed greatly to French romanticism. She was seen as a moderator during the French Revolution and known as a fervent fighter of Napoleonism in Europe.

She was also quoted as saying:

“L’amour est un égoïsme à deux.”

Translation: Love is a selfishness for two.

In another quote of Staël’s, she perfectly states how indulgent love can feel.

“L’amour est l’emblème de l’éternité. Il brouille toute notion de temps, efface tout souvenir d’un début, annule toute peur d’une fin.”  

Translation: Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.

Madame de Staël’s notion of love as eternal and oftentimes time-stopping is beautiful and inspiring. Even in today’s world, where things go by so fast, it’s worth remembering that love will always keep us tethered to the present moment.

Now that you’ve gotten 34 of the best French love quotes, your head should be filled with romantic ideas and poetic language. These are perfect for unique tattoos, Valentine’s day cards, letters to a loved one, or in a sweet text. Spread the love today and share one of these heartfelt, meaningful French quotes with someone you care about!

Hunter Van Ry

Hunter Van Ry, the owner of Frenchplanations.com, has spent extensive periods of time living in both France and Canada learning and studying the French language. He created Frenchplanations as a way to help others improve their French with easy-to-understand explanations.

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40 Peace Quotes That Inspire Inner Balance And Love

Find harmony and inspiration with this collection of uplifting quotes.

Inner Peace Quotes

Calming peace quotes, inspirational peace quotes.

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Whether you are seeking a special quote to insert into a card for a friend , looking to embrace your own inner peace, or need something inspirational to caption a social post, let this collection of peace quotes be your guide to a more harmonious world.

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• “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” ― Michael Cunningham
• “It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.” ― Aristotle
• “You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.” ― Eckhart Tolle
• “Peace is not something you wish for, it is something you make, something you are, something you do and something you give away. ” ― Robert Fulghum
• “You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself.” ― Mitch Albom
• “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” ― Siddhārtha Gautama
• “You have everything you need for complete peace and total happiness right now.” ― Wayne W. Dyer
• “World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just mere absence of violence. Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.” ― Dalai Lama XIV
• “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.” ― Albert Schweitzer
• “Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. We all wish for world peace, but world peace will never be acheived unless we first establish peace within our own minds. We can send so-called 'peacekeeping forces' into areas of conflict, but peace cannot be oppossed from the outside with guns. Only by creating peace within our own mind and helping others to do the same can we hope to achieve peace in this world.” ― Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
• “Peace begins with a smile." ― Mother Teresa
• “Many people think excitement is happiness.... But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh
• “If you love me as you say you do," she whispered, "Make it so that I am at peace.” ― Leo Tolstoy
• “You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one.” ― John Lennon
• “There is no 'way to peace,' there is only 'peace.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
• “Rest and be thankful.” ― William Wordsworth
• “Always ask yourself: "What will happen if I say nothing?” ― Kamand Kojouri
• “To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.”― J. Krishnamurti
• “The more humble and obedient to God a man is, the more wise and at peace he will be in all that he does.” ― Thomas à Kempis
• “I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
• “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.” ― Buddha
• “There is peace even in the storm." ― Vincent van Gogh
• “The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.” ― Marianne Williamson
• “Language is the key to the heart of people.” ― Ahmed Deedat
• “Peace is always beautiful.” ― Walt Whitman
• “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
• “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” ― Jimi Hendrix
• “Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.” ― Laini Taylor
• “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
• “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ― Albert Einstein
• “When you do the right thing, you get the feeling of peace and serenity associated with it. Do it again and again.” ― Roy T. Bennett
• “It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters,” ― Amit Ray
• “Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” ― Thomas Merton
• “A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.” ― Daisaku Ikeda
• “In this world, whenever there is light, there are also shadows. As long as the concept of winners exist, there must also be losers. The selfish desire of wanting to maintain peace causes wars and hatred is born to protect love.” ― Masashi Kishimoto
• “We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.” ― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
• “If peace can only come through killing someone, then I don't want it.” ― Hiro Mashima
• “If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nations. When there is order in the nations, there will peace in the world.” ― Confucius

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Sophia Bush Confirms Ashlyn Harris Romance, Comes Out As Queer In Moving Essay

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Sophia Bush says she finally feels like she “can breathe.”

The “One Tree Hill” alum wrote a powerful essay published in Glamour Thursday in which she reveals that she now identifies as queer and confirms that she’s in a romantic relationship with former U.S. soccer player Ashlyn Harris .

“I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum,” Bush wrote. “Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer . I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

Bush said she’s “experienced so much safety, respect, and love in the queer community” both as an ally and member.

“I sort of hate the notion of having to come out in 2024. But I’m deeply aware that we are having this conversation in a year when we’re seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history,” she wrote. “There were more than 500 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills proposed in state legislatures in 2023 , so for that reason I want to give the act of coming out the respect and honor it deserves.”

She explained that coming out and finding love has been revolutionary for her mental health.

“I finally feel like I can breathe. I don’t think I can explain how profound that is,” Bush wrote. “I feel like I was wearing a weighted vest for who knows how long. I hadn’t realized how heavy it was until I finally just put it down.”

Bush also took the opportunity to clear up rumors that she and Harris began their relationship on nefarious terms.

Bush was married to Grant Hughes for a little more than a year before she filed for divorce in August 2023 . Harris filed for divorce from her wife and former U.S. Women’s National Team teammate Ali Krieger in September 2023 . The athlete and former couple share two children.

Soon after their respective splits, gossip about Bush and Harris began circulating online, which Bush described as “blatant lies,” “violent threats,” and “ accusations of being a home-wrecker .”

Bush wrote, “What felt like seconds after I started to see what was in front of me, the online rumor mill began to spit in the ugliest ways.”

She added: “The ones who said I’d left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women — my partners have known what I’m into for as long as I have (so that’s not it, y’all, sorry!).”

Bush also shared how she and Harris fell in love.

She explains that in the summer of 2023, she was “separated and preparing to file for divorce” and soon began bonding with other friends who were having troubles in their romantic relationships. Bush said that she began a kind of support group — in which they’d read “books written by great therapists,” send each other “inspirational memes and silly TikToks” when times got tough, and shared a “‘Begin Again’ Amazon shopping list” created for “the ones moving out and starting over.”

Bush wrote that a member of her support group happened to be Harris, a friend of Bush’s since 2019, and was “in the process of figuring out her own split from her wife.”

Bush noted that other members of their support group noticed her and Harris’ compatibility before she did.

“It really took other people in our safe support bubble pointing out to me how we’d finish each other’s sentences or be deeply affected by the same things,” Bush wrote.

“I didn’t expect to find love in this support system,” Bush added. “I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it. And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option. What I saw was a friend with her big, happy life. And now I know she thought the same thing about me.”

Bush wrote after some encouragement from their mutual friends, she eventually “asked Ashlyn to have a non-friend-group hang to talk about it.”

“And that meal was four and a half hours long and truly one of the most surreal experiences of my life thus far,” Bush wrote. “In hindsight, maybe it all had to happen slowly and then suddenly all at once.”

Being that this shift was a private one, Bush noted that she wasn’t too keen to share the details of her sexuality and blooming romance online with the often merciless masses.

“Just because I didn’t want to process my realizations in real time on social media and spell them out for the world doesn’t mean the journey wasn’t long and thoughtful and exhaustive,” Bush wrote.

As for Harris, Bush said she is “absolutely in awe of her relentless integrity.”

“The way she prioritizes and centers her kids, not only in her life but in the core of her being, is breathtaking to behold,” Bush wrote. “Falling in love with her has sutured some of my own childhood wounds, and made me so much closer to my own mother.”

As for Bush’s parents, they seem to be totally on board with her romance with Harris.

“I really love who I am, at this age and in this moment,” Bush wrote. “I’m so lucky that my parents, having spent time with Ash over the holidays, said, ‘ Well, this finally looks right. ’ I know it could have gone differently.”

To read Bush’s essay in full, head over to Glamour .

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Sophia Bush pens open letter to address homewrecker rumors, Ashlyn Harris relationship

Sophia Bush is addressing her sexuality and infidelity rumors for the first time.

The "One Tree Hill" alum, 41, filed for divorce from entrepreneur Grant Hughes in August after a year of marriage. A month later, retired American soccer player Ashlyn Harris filed for divorce from her former teammate Ali Krieger. Shortly after Bush and Harris' divorce's became public, People reported in October that the two were dating.

In a personal essay written for Glamour , Bush explained the slow lead up and "painful conversations" that took place before she and Harris pursued a relationship. Social media, however, viewed their love as an affair.

"The online rumor mill began to spit in the ugliest ways. There were blatant lies. Violent threats. There were accusations of being a home-wrecker," she wrote. "The ones who said I’d left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women — my partners have known what I’m into for as long as I have."

She added: "The idea that I left my marriage based on some hysterical rendezvous — that, to be crystal-clear, never happened — rather than having taken over a year to do the most soul crushing work of my life? Rather than realizing I had to be the most vulnerable I’ve ever been, on a public stage, despite being terrified to my core? It feels brutal."

Sophia Bush, Ashlyn Harris relationship: How it began

Bush, who met Harris in 2019, said she bonded with the soccer star after she and a group of women attended an event in Cannes during the summer of 2023. At the time, she and Hughes were "separated and preparing to file for divorce" and she met other women at the event going through relationship issues. They had formed a support group for other women in break ups and divorcees.

"It was tragic and hard. But it was also beautiful. There were moments of incredible sadness because no one signs up to get married thinking it’ll end. The days when we knew people needed to laugh, we sent inspirational memes and silly TikToks. We read books written by great therapists and shared emo quotes from poets," Bush recalled.

The actress said she "didn’t expect to find love in this support system" and she felt like her feelings for Harris developed slowly and simultaneous overnight. "And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option."

After "countless sessions of therapy" and some coaxing from friends, Bush said she finally asked the soccer pro to hang out as more than friends. The dinner date was "truly one of the most surreal experiences of my life thus far," she wrote.

The "Good Sam" star and producer said she had always felt connected to the queer community despite not publicly declaring she was a part of it. "I sort of hate the notion of having to come out in 2024," she wrote, although acknowledging visibility helps "in a year when we’re seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history."

"There were more than 500 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills  proposed in state legislatures in 2023, so for that reason I want to give the act of coming out the respect and honor it deserves," she continued. "I’ve experienced so much safety, respect, and love in the queer community, as an ally all of my life, that, as I came into myself, I already felt it was my home. I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum."

Coming out isn’t actually over. Here’s why.

As far as the exact label, Bush said, "I think the word that best defines it is queer. I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.

"I have real joy. It took me 41 years to get here. And while I marvel at it, I will also make space for people’s pain," she continued, paying respect to victims of "bullying and harassment and being outed without consent."

Related: Is all the anger, fury really about transgender rights? Maybe not.

Sofia Bush says she 'threw up' after posting about her 1-year-wedding anniversary

Bush also discussed the unraveling of her marriage, which she said she realized before their nuptials.

"In April of 2022 I was close to calling off my wedding. Instead of running away, I doubled down on being a model wife," she wrote. "In 2023 my now ex-husband posted a lovely tribute to our first anniversary on Instagram. When I saw it, I felt the blood drain from my face. … I felt nothing."

Bush said she pushed through their relationship issues because of the reiterated comments that "marriage is hard" and due to public pressure, she posted about their anniversary.

"I typed something about how incredibly happy I was and tried to drown out the familiar voice in my head. 'Make it look easy. Make it look perfect. If your smile is shiny enough, maybe no one will notice that up close all of your teeth are broken,'" she recalled. "I hit post. And then I walked into the bathroom and threw up."

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Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is

Credit... Andres Kudacki/Associated Press

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Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

• April 26, 2024

Salman Rushdie

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , Google or wherever you get your podcasts .]

I feel as if I’ve always known who Salman Rushdie is. He sat in my consciousness as the author of this eerie-sounding novel called “ The Satanic Verses, ” a novel so somehow dangerous, he had to go into hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, said Rushdie and anyone involved in its publication should be killed for blaspheming Islam.

In August of 2022, more than 30 years after the fatwa, a fanatic with a knife attacked and tried to kill Rushdie. He survived, though he lost an eye. His latest book, “ Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder ,” is about the attack and its aftermath. But it’s also about his life. It’s about his marriage. It’s about his children. And it’s about the invention of other versions of him that became more real in the world than he was, other versions of him that almost got him killed.

This is what I now understand after reading “Knife,” what I now understand after I went and read, for the first time, “The Satanic Verses”: I have never known who Salman Rushdie is. And maybe not just him. How many people out there do I wrongly think that I know?

Rushdie and I talked for an episode of my podcast. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Ezra Klein: I want to begin with a story you mention a little bit offhandedly in the book: “The Shadow” by Hans Christian Andersen.

Salman Rushdie: I think it’s my favorite story of his. It’s about a man whose shadow gets detached from him and goes away.

For many years, he loses his shadow. The shadow has traveled the world. The shadow is quite sophisticated and cool and in some ways is more interesting than the man. The shadow returns and the man and the shadow spend some time together. Then the man meets this princess, who he’s very taken by and interested in. And the princess decides that she prefers the shadow to the man, and actually the shadow manages to persuade her that he’s the real thing and the man is the echo or the phony or the shadow.

And in the end, the shadow manages to arrange for the man to be executed. So the shadow takes over the life of the man.

So what did that story mean to you?

It meant to me that a thing that happens — more and more often, I think — is that a shadow self can separate itself from the person and end up becoming, in some way, more real than the original person. People believe the shadow and don’t believe the self.

If I’d asked you in 1986, to describe how you understood yourself, what would your capsule sense of Salman Rushdie have been?

The ’80s were a very good decade for me. It began in 1981 with the publication and success of “Midnight’s Children,” which was important to me for a number of reasons.

First of all, because it was my first literary success, and there’s nothing quite like first success. And secondly, it financially allowed me to begin to live as a writer, rather than having to work in advertising, which I’d been doing.

It also deeply reconnected me to India. I had worried, living in London, that I was kind of drifting away from those roots. The novel was a very conscious attempt to try and reclaim them. And that was actually what made me happiest about the reception of the book — was the way in which it was received in India.

What was your public reputation at the time?

I had become identified as one of a rising group of British-based writers. Writers like Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro and Martin Amis and Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. I also had become perhaps a little bit more politically engaged than some of the others. So I had written and done things on television about racism in England and postcolonialism, the remnants of the empire, and so I was also associated with that kind of subject. Then came “The Satanic Verses,” and it changed everything.

When you began writing “The Satanic Verses,” what kind of book did you think you were writing?

I was writing these three stories. One was about a character named Gibreel, which is the Indian version of Gabriel, who was a movie actor who’s losing his mind and arrives rather dramatically, as a result of an airplane explosion, in 1980s London, at a time when the race relations situation was quite tense. This was the period of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

I guess what I thought I was doing was thinking about what happens to people when they migrate from one culture to another and how much of their identity is brought into question by doing that. They’re suddenly in a language that isn’t their first language, and they’re in a community that doesn’t know them. They very often are surrounded by belief systems different from their own. They face all these challenges.

And I remember thinking I should try and make the novel itself that kind of challenge. And so the question of religious belief becomes one of the subjects of the book — Gibreel having these dreams about the birth of a religion. And I thought I’d made sufficient distance, because in the novel and in his dreams, the religion is not called Islam and the prophet is not called Muhammad and the city is not called Mecca. All this is happening in the dreams of somebody who’s losing his mind.

I thought, you know, this is what we call fiction. Some people took it the wrong way.

What is the actual story you tell in the book that causes the offense?

Well, of course, the people who attacked the book had not read it. So there’s that.

There is a well-known story that is in many of the traditions of Islam. To put it simply, there were three very successful popular winged goddesses in Mecca at the time whose temples were at the gates of the city. This is a big trading city, so people would come and go through the gates, and they would make offerings at these temples — or, put it another way, they would pay taxes.

The families that ran these temples were very wealthy and powerful in the city. And so the theory is that the Prophet was offered a deal, and the story goes that he comes down from the mountain and recites some verses which accept the status of these goddesses at the level of the angels. And then it seems as if there was a lot of opposition to his statement from amongst the new faithful.

And after a short period of time, he rejects those verses, and he says that the devil spoke to him in the guise of the angel and that these were satanic verses which should be expunged from the Quran, which they were, and replaced by other verses in which he discounts these goddesses.

So that’s the episode about a possible temptation and then the rejection of the temptation. I came across this story when I was at university, when I was at Cambridge. One of the things I was studying was early Islamic history. And I remember thinking, you know, good story. That was 1968. Twenty years later, I find out how good a story it was.

To the best of your understanding now, why does the fatwa happen?

Well, there’s a political reason why it happens, which is that chronologically the moment in Iran at which it happened was very soon after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, in which essentially a whole generation of young Iranian people had died for no gain.

The revolution was probably more unpopular and in greater danger at that moment than at any other moment. And I think, frankly, Khomeini was looking for a way of rallying the troops, and unfortunately, I became it.

People involved with the book in other countries were attacked and killed, which is something I did not know.

The worst thing was the Japanese translator of the book, who was a college professor who was actually a specialist in Islamic history and art, was murdered one night near his office on campus in Japan. My Italian translator was attacked at his residence and fortunately survived. My Norwegian publisher was shot several times in the back while getting up in the morning to go to work. He also miraculously survived.

I felt horrible, because they felt like proxy attacks. They really wanted me. They couldn’t get at me, so they got at them.

And I remember calling William Nygaard, who is my Norwegian publisher, to apologize to him. And he said, “Salman, don’t apologize. I’m a grown-up. I knew that I wanted to publish ‘The Satanic Verses,’ and I’m very happy that I did.” And then in a kind of wonderfully publishing way, he said, “Guess what. I’ve just ordered a very large reprint.”

I guess in publishing, that is the best revenge.

There’ve been occasions where I felt myself in the company of really brave people. I think if you’ve just been shot three times in the back and your reaction to that is to order a reprint, that’s courage.

I hadn’t read “The Satanic Verses” until preparing for this show with you. I think I’d always assumed it must be a pretty extreme and offensive piece of literature. And then I went and read it, and it’s not. It’s a very fun, stuffed, manic, exciting, imaginative novel, but it’s nothing like what I had assumed.

I can’t even tell you how many times that people who, like you, have finally got around to reading the book, have said to me, “Well, where’s the problem? Where’s the dirty bit?” And the other thing people say to me is, “Who knew it was funny?”

That was actually my first reaction. I didn’t expect the tone of the book at all. It’s very funny. Before “The Satanic Verses,” people thought my books were funny. People would write about me as a funny writer. After “The Satanic Verses,” for a long time, nobody wrote about me as a funny writer. It was as if, because the thing that had happened to me was not funny — that it was dark and obscurely theological — I must be dark and obscurely theological.

The characteristics of the attack were transposed onto the person being attacked. And that other me, who was funny and antic and interested in mythology and fantasy and politics and history — that person vanished.

In a way, the biggest damage that the attack on “The Satanic Verses” did to me was not physical danger. It was the damage to people’s thinking about my writing. A lot of people, I think, who might have enjoyed the book and might have enjoyed my books in general have been put off by the shadow of the Islamist attack.

But it was almost universally true that the people who attacked it did not read it. I remember seeing a television interview, when I was still living in England, with one of the leaders of the Indian Muslim protest against the book. The television reporters asked him if he’d read it, and he said this rather wonderful thing. He said, “No, I don’t need to walk in the gutter to know that it contains filth.”

So that was the kind of attitude: You don’t need to read it. It’s just bad.

We’ve talked a bit about who the public Salman was, before the book. And as I understood you describe it, you’re a postcolonial writer. To an extent, you’re a man of politics, a man roughly of the left, critical of Thatcher. Who emerges now?

Well, what happens is that entire self that had been how I was seen and how I thought of myself for a decade was just erased overnight. It’s as if it didn’t exist. And what was created instead was this irresponsible, selfish, arrogant, bad writer and bad person who had deliberately set out to offend the great world religion and only just about deserved to be protected from harm. Only just about.

It was very shocking. First of all, I had been quite a vocal critic of the Margaret Thatcher government, and that was the government that had to offer me protection. So on the one hand, there were accusations of hypocrisy. And then there was a very upsetting literary strain to the hostility. Writers I wouldn’t expect — John Berger, Germaine Greer, John le Carré. One of that group said nobody can insult a great world religion with impunity. As if to say: If you do that, then you don’t deserve to be safe.

I remember being very surprised to find Jimmy Carter on the side of the detractors. That was almost more shocking to me than the Islamic attack, because I thought, you know, the Iranian regime is a tyrannical, authoritarian regime, and if it behaves in a tyrannical, authoritarian way, it’s not entirely surprising. But to have Western artists and intellectuals doing that was very, very upsetting.

And in India, too. My family was originally Kashmiri. And I’ve written a lot about Kashmir. I wrote about it in “Midnight’s Children,” and I wrote about it in “Shalimar the Clown.” And I now know, because a kind of jihadist mind-set has increased in Kashmir, that if I were to go there, I might not be safe. And that feels horrible. The place from which my family comes is a place to which I can’t safely go. Both my parents are buried in Karachi, Pakistan, and there’s no way I can ever go and visit their grave.

Obviously you do not like the version of yourself that was created that was worthy of being murdered. What is your relationship to the more sainted public version of yourself — the symbol?

I feel like a working artist, and I would like to be known and judged by the work that I make.

Having said that, I was involved in the free speech issue before anything happened to me. I was working with the British branch of PEN, trying to defend various writers in trouble in various parts of the world. A lot of writers’ organizations really stood up for me. And I was very grateful for that.

So that became a part of how I saw myself. I have to say a secondary part because I still think the person who sits alone in a room and makes things up is who I really am.

How did your writing change under this pressure?

I tried to not let it change. I remember thinking very consciously quite early after the fatwa and all that — of course, there was physical danger, but there was also artistic danger. There were ways in which this attack could destroy me as an artist. It could frighten me, and so then I would not write anything risky.

I would write safe little frightened books, or it would fill me so much with anger and a desire for revenge that I would write revenge books. And I’ve told myself that both of those would be the destruction of my artistic independence and whatever quality I have as a writer, it would destroy. I think probably the — one of the greatest acts of will that I’ve ever performed in my life was to try and not let my writing be knocked off track by the attack on “The Satanic Verses.”

You moved to New York in 2000. And that becomes another shadow self that you talk about in [“Knife”], where you develop a reputation. I think you call it Salman the party animal.

A party boy, yeah. And I’m truly not.

Would you own it if you were?

I actually don’t really like big parties. I’m sociable, that’s true. But I like to see my friends one at a time so we can actually talk to each other.

When I started living in New York, I realized that it wasn’t so much a question of me being frightened, as people being frightened of me, because of the threat of danger hovering over them. Like a dark angel over my head. And I thought, “If people can see that I’m not being scared, then maybe they’ll stop being scared.” So I deliberately embarked on a policy of public visibility, going to places where I knew I’d be photographed and where, you know, The New York Post would write about me. And it worked, because after quite a short period of time, people thought, “Oh yeah, he’s around and about, and it’s fine.”

It kind of went too far that I turned into this social butterfly, which, in my view, I’m not really.

I’m going to try something a little tricky here. I don’t, in any way, want to trivialize the violence, the terror you’ve lived through.

I was struck with the thought that, for decades now, you have lived the most extreme possible version of a very modern condition, in which little scraps of yourself — scraps of things you’ve written or echoes of interpretations of things you’ve written — ricochet around an internet or a world and create this other version of you that people begin to believe in.

This happens in a very small and much less terrorizing way to people all the time on TikTok, on Facebook, on X. They say something, and soon a version of them emerges that is more real to other people than they are. Do you think this is a more common thing?

I agree entirely with how you describe the creation of false selves by this new weapon of social media. I’ve often thought that if these things had existed in 1989, I would have been in far more danger because the speed with which material can be transmitted is so much greater and the way in which groupthink can be created and mobs can be created would have enormously escalated the danger.

At that time, the most sophisticated method of transmission was the fax machine, and that kept the lid on it to some degree — until Khomeini blew the lid off.

I know that there are two or three graphics containing absolutely false quotes from me — things I’ve never even come close to saying — which keep cropping up. People keep retweeting them and repeating them. And even though I have once or twice said, “Look, I never said this,” that doesn’t stop it. It just keeps going. So there are quotes ascribed to me, you know, views ascribed to me, which I don’t hold, which are actually antithetical to things that I think. But they’re out there.

I think, to some degree, it’s always been the case, before social media, that there’s a disconnect between the private self of the writer and the way in which they’re publicly perceived. Various writers — Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene — they all had this sense of there being a public self, which wasn’t quite them but which was how they were seen. And I had a kind of magnified version of that, and social media certainly helps to magnify it.

I know people who have gone through public scandal who didn’t deserve it, who hadn’t done the thing or there really was no thing.

One thing I’ve noticed is many of them go through a period — sometimes don’t even get out of the period — of believing they must somehow deserve it. They almost have to believe they did something deserving of it for their reality to make sense to them. Did that happen to you?

Yeah, right at the beginning, I began to believe two things. First of all, there was a kind of category mistake about “The Satanic Verses,” which was being treated as a work of polemical fact, whereas actually it’s a work of imagination and fiction. If I could just explain that this is not fact, this is fiction, people would say, “Oh, yeah, we get it now.” And that was kind of foolish. And then I thought if I can just explain in interviews and essays and so on who I am and what I thought I was doing and why I believe it to be completely legitimate, the people would again go, “Oh, gosh, we made a terrible mistake.”

About a year or a year and a half into the story, when I was very, very depressed and didn’t see how it would ever end, I thought maybe what I have to do is to reach out to the Muslim community and try and apologize. And I did, and it rebounded very hard in my face.

And actually, my sister, whom I love and is closer to me than anybody else in the world, called me when she heard me making these apologias. She said, “What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?” And I thought, you know, “Yes, I have. I’m behaving in a deranged way.” And that felt to me like hitting rock bottom.

I hate that this is true about culture right now. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it be the case that apologizing — whether the person did something or did not do something — helps. Because what apologizing seems to me to do now is it gives people the license to believe that it was all justified in the first place.

That’s why there’s a crazed power to people like Donald Trump, who exist in a world without, I think, personal shame. Because they don’t apologize, they’re able to keep the instability of the different realities coherent: I never lost the election. I never did anything wrong. I never did any of it.

So there never needs to be a moment where the people who are on their side have to reconcile the sort of admission of wrongdoing. Whereas the people who try to come out and be decent people about it suffer.

Shamelessness is the great public weapon of our time. If you really have it — and yes, of course, he does in spades — you can do what he’s done, which is to spend a lifetime getting away with it. I mean, not just since he’s been in politics, but way before then. I mean, getting away with it is his great skill.

And the tool that he uses is absolute lack of shame. And I mean, I would put, in a miniature way, ex-British prime minister Boris Johnson in the same bag. Absolute, I mean, total liar in everything he says and does and totally shameless about it and gets away with it. Until he didn’t.

We live in this age where you have an algorithmic global community. And communities discipline through shaming each other and eliciting shame in each other. That’s a supercharged dynamic in modern life. So if you happen to be immune to it, it’s a superpower.

This is maybe a function of being almost 77 years old, but I really go less and less toward social media. I barely use it, and every time I go there, I kind of wish I hadn’t. So I think maybe I’ll just, whatever years are left to me, manage to do it without being a part of the modern world.

Let’s go quite a bit forward in time. It’s 2022, before the Chautauqua event where the attack happens. At this point, who are you to yourself? And who do you think you are at that point to the public?

I genuinely thought that the risk was in the past. I had 22 years of evidence for that, so it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that. But at this point, I had more or less completely regained, let’s say, the life of a writer, where I was doing everything that writers get asked to do. I was doing book tours and literary festivals and lectures and readings and all of that. Especially after near sequestration, it was very pleasant to be back in the world.

Where are you on Aug. 12, and what happens?

I was in New York City. On Aug. 11, I had flown up to do an event at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. My friend Henry Reese had been running an asylum program in Pittsburgh. He had a whole little street of houses which he made available to writers from various countries who needed a safe place. Chautauqua had invited Henry to come and talk about that, and he asked me if I would come and have the conversation with him.

We had just come out onstage. The Chautauqua Amphitheater is a very large space. And there were probably something like 1,500 people there. Henry and I came out and were introduced by someone from the institution. We were sitting in chairs on the stage. Almost the moment the introduction was over, I saw this man approaching rapidly from my right. He came sprinting up the steps and attacked me.

You write , “This is as close to understanding my inaction as I’ve been able to get: The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.” What do you mean?

I mean that we all live in a picture of the real. We all have a sense of how things are, and that sense of how things are is our reality. And then when something calamitous happens, somebody arrives in a picture of school with an assault rifle.

Somebody arrives in a church with a gun or in a shopping mall, you know. Everybody in those locations has a picture of what they’re doing. If you’re in a church, you’re there for reasons of belief and worship. If you’re in a shopping mall, you’re there to shop. If you’re in a school, you’re there to be at school.

And that’s how you see the world. And the explosion of violence into that picture destroys that reality. And then you literally don’t know the shape of the world. And very often, I think, people are paralyzed and don’t know what to do. How do you act in a moment when the thing that’s happened isn’t a part of the narrative you think you’re in?

And that’s what happened to me. I thought I was frozen.

The attack was a knife attack. And you write that “a gunshot is action at a distance but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy.” What’s intimate about it?

There wasn’t even an inch of space between him and me. He’s not shooting from a distance. He’s right up in my face, sticking a knife in me. And then, of course, I fell down, and he was on top of me.

So that’s about as intimate as you can get, to be underneath somebody who’s on top of you. I mean, there are other occasions when that happens, and those are more pleasurable.

Some of the book is about trying to understand the attacker. What do you know about him?

I know very little. There have been just a couple of newspaper reports on which I base my knowledge of him. What seems to be the story, as far as I can piece it together, is that his parents were of Lebanese origin. They moved to the United States, and he was born and raised in Jersey. His parents separated. His father went back to Lebanon. His mother stayed in New Jersey with himself and his sisters.

Until he was approximately 19 years old, he was a kid growing up in Jersey and had no criminal record. And then at about that time, he chooses to go to Lebanon to visit his father. His father lives in a village which is very near the Israeli border and is a very strongly Hezbollah village with billboards of Hezbollah heroes around the streets. His mother says that when he first got there, he really didn’t like it, he wanted to come home right away. But he stayed.

He came back a month later and, according to his mother, had completely transformed, was a different person and was now angry with her for not having taught him properly about religion. His mother’s house in Fairview has a basement, and he went and sequestered himself in the basement, lived separately from everyone else, playing video games and watching YouTube videos.

Essentially, he lived a pretty solitary life for something like four years, between his visit to Lebanon and his decision to attack me. And somehow, in that period of time, he becomes the kind of person who can commit murder.

At a certain point, he sees something on Twitter from the Chautauqua Institution, announcing their program of events, and he saw that I was listed on the program and decided to make his plan.

The idea that he could become someone who could murder seems, in some ways, less improbable than that you could end up as his target. This is somebody born after “The Satanic Verses.” And you’re just not there anymore. There’s a lot that has happened — the war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq. How does he end up focusing on you?

This is what I don’t know. I can guess that while he was with his father in this very Hezbollah-dominated village that somebody might have mentioned my name as a bad guy, anti-Muslim, and it maybe was triggered by his seeing something on social media about my upcoming talk. But I don’t really know.

I remember saying to my editor at Random House that if I was to write a story in which somebody, by his own admission, had read only two pages of somebody’s writing and seen a couple of YouTube videos and then would to decide to murder that person, my editor would say to me, that’s not convincing. It’s not enough motivation.

You say in the book that your attempted murder seemed undermotivated, which is one of the funnier — I mean, darkly funny — lines I’ve read in a while.

I was thinking about Iago and Othello, that the only thing that happens to Iago is that he’s passed over for a promotion. That’s it. That’s his beef. And because of that, he decides to destroy the lives of two people, Othello and Desdemona.

And I often wondered, “Is there such a thing as a person who is simply evil, just a bad guy, doesn’t need much of a motive?” And the reason that doesn’t quite work in this case is because, prior to his visit to Lebanon, he was a perfectly nice person. The transformation is what’s interesting.

There’s a way in which he’s trying to kill some other version of you. He doesn’t actually know anything about you.

No, he didn’t do any research. He seemed, in a way, very uninterested. I guess he’d heard from people he was influenced by that I was some kind of demonic figure. There is a very effective degree of demonization that has taken place across the Islamic world, in which there’s a lot of people who grow up thinking that I’m a kind of boogeyman. On the other hand, his own family were not like that. They were not fanatics. They were perfectly secularized American citizens. So I don’t know where he got it from.

The core of the book is this imagined dialogue between the two of you. And one thing you say to him in this imagined dialogue is, “I know that it is possible to construct an image of a man, a second self, that bears very little resemblance to the first self, but the second self gains credibility because it is repeated over and over again, until it begins to feel real, more real than the first self.”

You imagine saying this to him, almost as a way of helping him understand what he was doing. You’re creating his shadow self — a version of him that is now more real in the world than he is. Tell me about that.

I included this anecdote about Samuel Beckett being the victim of a knife attack, and he almost died. In his case, he actually did go to confront his attacker in court and said to him, “Why do you do it?” And all the man was able to say was, “I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”

And I thought, “That’s useless.” Even if I was permitted by his lawyer to have a meeting, I probably wouldn’t get an apology, because there’s no indication of any remorse. I would get some form of sloganized answer, which wouldn’t answer this hole in my understanding of him. But how can somebody with so little knowledge of a person agree to murder them?

So I thought, maybe the best way to do this is to use my skill of imagination and storytelling to try and get inside his head and at least create a character that I can believe might do something like this. Whether it’s his real character or not actually becomes secondary.

I took the book as a very deep, intense assertion of the reality of your actual self. The book is physical and intimate and graphic about your rehabilitation and your hospital stay. It felt to me like a deep insistence that the Salman Rushdie who mattered was the one who actually lived through all this.

Well, I hope that people read it that way, because I’ve rarely in my life felt so deeply physically connected to my body as I have in this last year and a half. It was such an incredibly physical thing that happened, both the attack and the recovery and the psychological ramifications of all of that.

I always think publishing a book is a little bit like undressing in public. But this one really is. The memoir form was more or less invented by Rousseau in his confessions. And ever since then, I’ve always thought the principle of the autobiographical memoir is: Tell as much truth as possible. If you’re not going to tell the whole, naked, unvarnished truth, don’t write the book.

Did trying to write this self-portrait change your sense of yourself?

That’s a good question. No, I think it in some way clarified it.

One of the questions I ask myself in the book is: Given that you’ve been, by great good fortune and medical skill, given a second act that you weren’t supposed to have, how are you going to use it? What will you do with that gift of time?

And the reason why so much of the book is about love and family is because that’s what’s right at the front of my head now. In whatever time I have left — I hope it’ll be a while — that’s what I want to focus on. That and work and, frankly, nothing else.

Look, this is the 22nd book. If there aren’t any more books, that’s OK. The priority now is to lead a life of loving and being loved. That’s what I think this thing has taught me.

I think that’s a nice place to end. So then always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

I would recommend “Don Quixote” — for many people, the first great masterpiece in the novel form. There’s now a wonderful new translation of it by Edith Grossman, which makes it very accessible to English readers. Previous translations were, frankly, a little dull. But this one is fantastically vivid and alive.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is one of the most joyful books ever written. From the first sentence, you are plunged into this world of magic.

And of the three great masters of the 20th century — Joyce, Proust and Kafka — we live in Kafka’s world. So I would probably say “The Trial” or “The Castle.”

Salman Rushdie, thank you very much.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Mrinalini Chakravorty.

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