“It almost always happens that lovers become childlike—because love accepts you. It makes no demands on you. Love does not say, ‘Be this, be that.’ Love simply says, ‘Be yourself. You are good as you are. You are beautiful as you are.’ Love accepts you. Suddenly you start dropping your ideals, ‘shoulds,’ personalities. You drop your old skin, and again you become a child. Love makes people young.'”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 279)
“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, air-less—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
C. S. Lewis
Heavy: An American Memoir [Book]
Book Overview: In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. Heavy is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.
“Love is by far the most important thing of all. It casts out fear. It is the fulfilling of the law. It covers a multitude of sins. Love is absolutely invincible. There is no difficulty that enough love will not cure; no disease that enough love will not heal; no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no wall that enough love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem. It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake; a sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.”
Emmet Fox, via No Excuses! (Page 256)
“We are often drawn to chaotic romantic partners because their chaos guarantees that we will always feel needed. In contrast, dating someone with their shit together is, in some ways, terrifying—they are so functional and self-sufficient and self-contained, how could we ever know that they need us? The answer is: they don’t need us. Yet they choose to spend their life with us anyway. And that is far more powerful.”
Mark Manson
“That was the enchantment that had happened to him in his sleep and through the om: he now loved everything and everyone, he was full of cheerful love for anything he saw. And it seemed to him now that he had been so ill earlier because he had been able to love nothing and no one.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 83)
“She thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of having misused or been misused. He spent wonderful hours with the clever and beautiful artist, became her pupil, her lover, her friend.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 60)