“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”

“A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.”

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”

“They grope before them like blind people and find each the other as they would a door. Almost like children that dread the night, they press close into each other. And yet they are not afraid. There is nothing that might be against them: no yesterday, no morrow; for time is shattered. And they flower from its ruins.He does not ask: 'Your husband?'She does not ask: 'Your name?'For indeed they have found each other, to be unto themselves a new generation.They will give each other a hundred new names and take them all off again, gently, as one takes an earring off.”

“But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty.”