Eros The Bittersweet Quotes

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me, Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature….

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.

When you are falling in love it is always already too late: dēute, as the poets say.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.

Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling and desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, category of thought, are confounded.

Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters 'I love you' in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between 'you' in the text and you in my life.

All lovers believe they are inventing love.

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons. But his reckoning involves a

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.

Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation that preys upon a jealous lover's mind.

The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions

It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? A mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant. This mood is no delusion, in Sokrates’ belief. It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved (249e-50c).

It was Sappho who likened a girl to an apple … and compared a bridegroom to Achilles. (Orationes 9.16)

stolen my reasoning mind” (Theognis 1271). Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less. This

Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in

The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

In fact, neither reader nor writer nor lover achieves such consumation. The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Suppression of impertinence is not the lover’s aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.

... η ιστορία σου αρχίζει τη στιγμή που ο Έρωτας εισβάλλει μέσα σου. Αυτή η εισβολή είναι ο μεγαλύτερος κίνδυνος της ζωής σου. Το πώς τη χειρίζεσαι είναι δείκτης της ποιότητας, της σοφίας και της ευγένειας που έχεις μέσα σου. Καθώς τη χειρίζεσαι, έρχεσαι σ' επαφή με τα όσα κρύβεις μέσα σου, μ' έναν τρόπο αιφνίδιο και εκπληκτικό. Αντιλαμβάνεσαι τι είσαι, τι σου λείπει, τι θα μπορούσες να είσαι.

Suppression of impertinence is not the lover’s aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot— well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach

Words do have edges. So do you.

Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.

Is it a matter of coincidence that the poets who invented Eros, making of him a divinity and a literary obsession, were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their poems in written form? To put the question more pungently, what is erotic about alphabetization?

I’m in love, I’m not in love! I’m insane, I’m not insane!

I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them.

Tyche, Chance; and Eros, Love, whom Hesiod made the creator of the world, whom Sappho called “a limb-dissolving, bitter-sweet, impracticable wild beast.