“If only, I thought, I could talk to Eugene just one more time. This was before I came to understand that you cannot make someone fall in love with you But here's what you can do. By arguing and pleading and screaming and crying and throwing plates and phoning a lot and bringing hot food and sending flowers and buying gifts and doing unsolicited favors and remembering a birthday and being nice and declaring your abiding love and trying hard or sometimes merely by being present, you can make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you.”
“But loving someone isn't only making promises you know you can keep. That's just playing it safe. Where's the moral fiber in that? Loving someone is making promises you want to keep with all your heart, and then doing everything you can to make it happen, even if you fail sometimes. But the point is to try, because that's how you stretch yourself and learn you can do more than you thought you could. And maybe next time, you'll stretch a little farther.”
“You cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up up them.”
“...falling in love and trying to make someone fall in love with you and working to stay in love and forcing yourself to fall out of love with someone who will never love you back is much, much more exhausting than being alone.”
“Love is seeing someone for who they are, and for all the things that they don't know they can be. Sometimes it's neither seeing things as good or bad, but seeing them as aspects that create the being. If you cannot love someone for all of the things that create their personality, then you'll find it hard to love them at all. I can be everything or nothing, but I cannot love without you.”
“When something happens to you, good or bad, consider what it means. There is a purpose to life's events, to teach you how to laugh more or not to cry too hard.You can't make someone love you, all you can do is be someone who can be loved, the rest is up to the person to realize your worth.”