I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (17 page)

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone—
but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

BETTE DAVIS

Love never dies of starvation, but often of digestion.

NINON DE LENCLOS

Love is an ocean of emotions, entirely surrounded by expenses.

THOMAS DEWAR

The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It's a perpetual wound.

MAUREEN DUFFY

Love ain't nothin' but sex misspelled.

HARLAN ELLISON

Ellison balanced this cynical observation with a sweet one: “Romantic love is the cloud of perfume through which you pass when you're in a
movie theater, and it reminds you of an aunt who hugged you when you were three years old.”

 

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love,
a request for money is the most chilly and havoc-wreaking.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Love's tongue is in the eyes.

PHINEAS FLETCHER

This observation captures the role that beauty plays in love. The eyes almost drink in great beauty, much like the tongue savors a great wine. Sometimes, though, the wine that looks so full and hearty turns out to be thin and insipid. Emerson said it all in a famous analogy: “Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”

 

On the banks of the grey torrent of life,
love is the only flower.

E. M. FORSTER

Love letters are the campaign promises of the heart.

ROBERT FRIEDMAN

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people
who get the most of what they can expect,
considering their value on the personality market.

ERICH FROMM

Love, like a running brook, is disregarded, taken for granted;
but when the brook freezes over, then people begin to remember
how it was when it ran, and they want it to run again.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

This comes from a letter Gibran wrote to Mary Haskell, the head of a private girls' school in Boston and a woman Gibran deeply loved. He proposed marriage to her, but she refused, feeling that it was not in
his
best interest to be married. Instead, she devoted her life to encouraging him to develop his talent.

 

We love because it's the only true adventure.

NIKKI GIOVANNI

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly
it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

MATT GROENING

This quotation is usually presented as if it reflected Groening's personal opinion, but it is in reality his darkly comic version of Friedrich Nietzsche's view of love. The quote comes from Groening's pre-
Simpsons
days, when it appeared in his underground comic strip
Life is Hell.
Two other philosophers were featured under the heading
What the Great Philosophers Have Said Vis-à-vis Love
:

“Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell.”
Bertrand Russell

“Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine-gun.”
Kierkegaard

 

Love is a fan club with only two fans.

ADRIAN HENRI

Love fattens on smooth words.

KATHARINE HEPBURN

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness,
of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gates of
fear.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

I have met on the street a very poor man who was in love.
His hat was old, his coat was out at the elbows,
the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

VICTOR HUGO

This is from the 1862 classic
Les Misérables
, where Hugo also wrote, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” In yet another memorable metaphor, Hugo wrote, “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

 

Love, I find, is like singing.
Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves,
though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Elizabeth Bowen was describing a similar phenomenon when she wrote: “When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.”

 

Love is…
the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart.

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

Love's like the measles—
all the worse when it comes late in life.

DOUGLAS JERROLD,
in an 1859 book

Forty years later, in 1889, Jerome K. Jerome wrote, “Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once.”

 

I'm not sure at all
If love is salve
Or just
A deeper kind of wound
I do not think it matters.

ERICA JONG

Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

STEPHEN KING

This comes from King's 1978 horror classic
The Stand
, as the character Tom reflects on the absence of love in Las Vegas.

 

The truest comparison we can make of love is to liken it to a fever.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

La Rochefoucauld was a seventeenth-century nobleman who, until age fifty, was known more for political intrigue than anything else. In 1665, he published
Maximes
, a volume of about five hundred quotable quotes on a host of subjects. History's greatest aphorist, he approached affairs of the heart with a keen metaphorical eye:

“Love, like fire, cannot survive without continual movement, and it ceases to live as soon as it ceases to hope or to fear.”

“Love is to the soul of him who loves what the soul is to the body.”

“It is with true love as with ghosts; everyone talks of it, but few have seen it.”

 

We love in another's soul whatever of ourselves we can deposit in it;
the greater the deposit, the greater the love.

IRVING LAYTON

Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame,
Very pretty, often hot and fierce
But still only light and flickering.
As love grows older, our hearts mature
And our love becomes as coals,
Deep burning and unquenchable.

BRUCE LEE

According to Lee's Widow, Lucy Lee Cadwell, Lee wrote this poem for her during their marriage. It first appeared in her 1975 book
Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew
. In the poem, Lee was clearly borrowing from both Jeremy Taylor and Henry Ward Beecher, whose observations we saw earlier.

 

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone,
it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Love is like a precious plant.
You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard
or just think it's going to get on by itself.
You've got to keep watering it.
You've got to really look after it and nurture it.

JOHN LENNON,
from a 1969 interview

Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it.

C. S. LEWIS

He is in love with an Ideal,
A creature of his own imagination,
A child of air; an echo of his heart;

And like a lily on a river floating,
She floats upon the river of his thoughts!

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

As the best wine doth make the sharpest vinegar,
so the deepest love turneth to the deepest hate.

JOHN LYLY

Love is like playing checkers. You have to know which man to move.

JACKIE “MOMS” MABLEY

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything,
and two minus one equals nothing.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia—
to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god
or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

H. L. MENCKEN

Mencken, one of America's great curmudgeons, railed at the folly of love for decades. He also wrote that “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another” and “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

 

Love matches, as they are called,
have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Several decades after Nietzsche wrote these words, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno continued the theme in his 1913 classic
The Tragic Sense of Life
: “Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.”

 

Love never dies a natural death.
It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.
It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds;
it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

ANAÏS NIN

Love is much like a wild rose,
Beautiful and calm,
But willing to draw blood in its defense.

MARK A. OVERBY

When the roses are gone, nothing is left but the thorns.

OVID

Love is the cheapest of religions.

CESARE PAVESE

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man
can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera
because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

MARCEL PROUST

No, this is not a typo (
common
misspelled as
comma
).
Comma bacillus
is the term for a microscopic, comma-shaped bacteria that causes Asiatic cholera in humans.

 

Love rules his kingdom without a sword.

ENGLISH PROVERB

Other memorable proverbs on the subject include these:

“Love is the bridge between two hearts.” (American)

“Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.” (English)

“Love teaches even donkeys to dance.” (French)

“The eyes are the doors of love.” (German)

“Love is a game in which both players cheat.” (Irish)

“Love cures the wound it makes.” (Latin)

 

The lover is a monotheist
who knows that other people worship different gods
but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.

THEODOR REIK

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

JULES RENARD

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules.
The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.

TOM ROBBINS

A love song is just a caress set to music.

SIGMUND ROMBERG

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination
and bottling the common-sense.

HELEN ROWLAND

Love must have wings to fly away from love,
And to fly back again.

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth,
but whose branches extend into heaven.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

This is from a 1922 sonnet. The passage poignantly describes the feeling of sadness when one's heartfelt love for another is only partially reciprocated.

 

Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables.

SAPPHO

Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out;
perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it.
It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin;
but there is always the scent of a god about it.

OLIVE SCHREINER

To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
from
A Midsummer Night's Dream

In his 1636 play
El Cid
, Pierre Corneille has a character say it this way: “Reason and love are sworn enemies.”

 

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,

SHAKESPEARE,
from
Venus and Adonis

There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it.

SHAKESPEARE,

from
Hamlet

Therefore is love said to be a child
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.

SHAKESPEARE,
from
A Midsummer Night's Dream

The child reference here is to Cupid. In the same play, Shakespeare also writes: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

 

Love is the only disease that makes you feel better.

SAM SHEPARD