Eternity Romantic Quotes

I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because 'romantic' doesn't mean 'sugary.' It's dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can't attain.

Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.

Bianca, camp is cool! It's got a pegasus stable and a sword-fighting arena and… I mean, what do you get by joining the Hunters?" To begin with," Zoe said, "immortality." I stared at her, then at Artemis. "She's kidding, right?" Zoe rarely kids about anything," Artemis said. "My Hunters follow me on my adventures. They are my maidservants, my companions, my sisters-in-arms. Once they swear loyalty to me, they are indeed immortal… unless they fall in battle, which is unlikely. Or break their oath." What oath?" I said. To foreswear romantic love forever," Artemis said. To never grow up, never get married. To be a maiden eternally." Like you?" The goddess nodded. I tried to imagine what she was saying. Being immortal. Hanging out with only middle-school girls forever. I couldn't get my mind around it.

Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.

I give you my name, my earthly possessions, and my eternal love. But of all the things I have, the thing I want most to give you are my eyes, these eyes that see how magnificently beautiful you are.

To foreswear romantic love forever. To never grow up, never get married. To be maiden eternally.

There’s a good kind of crazy, Kaylee,” he insisted softly, reaching out to wrap his warm hand around mine. “It’s the kind that makes you think about things that make your head hurt, because not thinking about them is the coward’s way out. The kind that makes you touch people who bruise your soul, just because they need to be touched. This is the kind of crazy that lets you stare out into the darkness and rage at eternity, while it stares back at you, ready to swallow you whole.

If a tear fell from my eyes, Each time I wished you were with me, I would have an ocean shore outside my door.

After you were bitten, I knew what would happen. I waited for you to change, every night, so I could bring you back and keep you from getting hurt." A chilly gust of wind lifter his hair and sent a shower of golden leaves glimmering down around him. He spred out his arms, letting them fall into his hands. He looked like a dark angel in an eternal autumn wood. "Did you know you get one happy day for everyone you catch?" I didn't know what he meant, even after he opened his fist to show me the quivering leaves crumpled in his palm. One happy day for every falling leaf you catch." Sam's voice was low. I watched the egdes of the leaves slowly unfold, fluttering in the breeze."How long did you wait?" It would have been romantic if hr'd had the courage to look into my face to say it, but instead, he dropped his eyes to the ground and scuffed his boots in the leaves- countless possibilities for happy days- on the ground. "I haven't stopped." And I should've said something romantic too, but i didn't have the courage, either. So instead, I watched the shy way he was chewing his lip and studying the leaves, and said, "That must've been very borring.

Love, at its core, is love—unadorned, undeniable, unending.

The "Holy-crap-that's-a-lot-of-pink" Zone would have been a more accurate description. I don't know what I was expecting a vampire's room to look like. Maybe lots of black, a bunch of books by Camus...oh, and a sensitive portrait of the only human the vamp had ever loved, who had no doubt died of something beautiful and tragic, thus dooming the vamp to an eternity of moping and sighing romantically. What can I say? I read a lot of books. But this room looked like it had been decorated by the unholy lovechild of Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake.

Again, there were maidens who cherished the firm belief that he had come from the sea. Because within his breast could be heard the roaring of the sea. Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it. Because his signs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with the smell of seaweed cast upon the shore.

And if you must sacrifice yourself, do that by marrying me. I’m not an easy man. You’ll earn your martyr’s crown before you’re done. Don’t condemn both of us to an eternity of unhappiness just because you’re too stiff-necked to face society’s censure.

Love is two people in love, who bond as one, destined for each other; this is the meaning of love. A piece of our spirit remains wherever we have been…

True love doesn't have an expiry date; it is eternal.

I cannot regret it. They tell us in the temple that true joy is found only in freedom from the Wheel that is death and rebirth, that we must come to despise earthly joy and suffering, and long only for the peace of the presence of the eternal. Yet I love this life on Earth, Morgan, and I love you with a love that is stronger than death, and if sin is the price of binding us together, life after life across the ages, then I will sin joyfully and without regret, so that it brings me back to you, my beloved!

If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship, - a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul, - if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations have gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the feet of another, and all for nothing, - if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you; treasure it, as the highest honor of your being, that ever you could so feel, -that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul.

Everything changes, but my love for you never will. I’ve fought myself on this too long and I can’t pretend anymore. I can’t feign that I don’t want to talk to you, to reach out and brush the hair out of your eyes, or wipe a tear off your cheek. I want to hold you, to tell you how much I love you, to kiss you without repercussions.” His voice grew softer, electricity sparking in the air. “I’ve loved you since I met you, Evangeline, and I will love you for all of eternity.

Cabal regarded her with mild amusement. “Smile when you whisper,” he advised her. “You’re supposed to be flirting with me, if you recall?” She stared at him icily. Then suddenly her expression thawed and she smiled winsomely, her eyes dewy with romantic love. “Oh, sweetheart… somebody tried to kill you? Whosoever would do such a thing to my nimpty-bimpty snookums?” Cabal could not have been more horrified if she’d pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. “What?” he managed in a dry whisper. “Smile when you whisper,” she said, her expression fixed and blood-curdlingly coquettish. You’re supposed to be flirting with me, remember?” “Please don’t do that.

...And although thus short, we shorten many ways, Living so little while we are alive; In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delight So unawares comes on perpetual night, And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight.

I need you like a blossom needs rain, like the winter ground needs spring-to soothe my parched soul.

We have been led to believe that if we are really in love, it will last forever. We will always have the wonderful feelings that we have at this moment. Nothing could ever come between us. Nothing will ever overcome our love for each other. [..] Unfortunately, the eternality of the in-love experience is fiction, not fact. The late psychologist Dr. Dorothy Tennov conducted long range studies on the in-love phenomenon. After studying scores of couples, she concluded that the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years.

Civilized beings regard the act of intercourse as the highest expression of romantic love. One need only observe the behavior of animals, however, to realize that the act is often a form of violence.

This life has no meaning to me now. Do not grieve for me, my dear. Up until the moment I lost her, I had a wonderful life. These moments now are the ones that are hard. I’m eager to depart this world and rejoin her in the next. Then, and only then, will I finally be at peace.

It was a romantic tale saying we were more than our bodies our soul lives on after death. We shed the outer body but the important bits the soul and heart lives on for eternity

Let love's eternal flame of hope hold back the shadows of the night.

I could tell you a thousand times, How much I love you, It still would not do justice on how much I love you.

A world anemic in love needs a day to celebrate love. I am a lover eternal, for me every day is valentine's day.

Yes. Perhaps I have lived with love, not against it. Love is not just a bourgeois romantic notion of finding the one true match who will fill one's soul so full that it brims over and splashes out uninterruptedly as if from some eternal pump. Love is also in this life that I've lived here in the countryside. And when I chose this life and pursued it and didn't regret it, I learned that one should stick to one's decision, nurture it and not deviate—that this is an expression of love.

[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation. Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

So, where are you from?" Agent Carson asked Reyes. "Originally?" I whirled around to face him again, this time pinning him with a warning glare. Carson was an FBI agent, but I was all about stealth. Surely she wouldn't pick up on my silent threat. He studied my mouth, not the least bit worried about my warning glare, then said at last, "Here and there." I relaxed against the seatback. He didn't say hell. Thank God he didn't say hell. It was always hard to explain to friends how, exactly, one's fiance was born and raised in the eternal flames of damnation. How his father was, in fact, public enemy number one. And how he escaped from hell and was born on earth as a human to be with his true love. As romantic as it all sounded, it was difficult to articulate without garnering a visit from men with butterfly nets.

Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty.

Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces.

God will not be tolerated. He instructs us to worship and fear Him. In our world, where hundreds of things distract us from God, we have to intentionally and consistently remind ourselves of Him. Because we don’t often think about the reality of who God is, we quickly forget that He is worthy to be worshiped and loved. We are to fear Him. The answer to each of these questions is simply this: because He’s God. He has more of a right to ask us why so many people are starving. As much as we want God to explain himself to us, His creation, we are in no place to demand that He give an account to us. Can you worship a God who isn’t obligated to explain His actions to you? Could it be your arrogance that makes you think God owes you an explanation? If God is truly the greatest good on this earth, would He be loving us if He didn’t draw us toward what is best for us (even if that happens to be Himself)? Doesn’t His courting, luring, pushing, calling, and even “threatening” demonstrate His love? If He didn’t do all of that, wouldn’t we accuse Him of being unloving in the end, when all things are revealed? Has your relationship with God actually changed the way you live? Do you see evidence of God’s kingdom in your life? Or are you choking it out slowly by spending too much time, energy, money, and thought on the things of this world? Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. Jesus’ call to commitment is clear: He wants all or nothing. Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. If life is a river, then pursuing Christ requires swimming upstream. When we stop swimming, or actively following Him, we automatically begin to be swept downstream. How could we think for even a second that something on this puny little earth compares to the Creator and Sustainer and Savior of it all? True faith means holding nothing back; it bets everything on the hope of eternity. When you are truly in love, you go to great lengths to be with the one you love. You’ll drive for hours to be together, even if it’s only for a short while. You don’t mind staying up late to talk. Walking in the rain is romantic, not annoying. You’ll willingly spend a small fortune on the one you’re crazy about. When you are apart from each other, it’s painful, even miserable. He or she is all you think about; you jump at any chance to be together. There is nothing better than giving up everything and stepping into a passionate love relationship with God, the God of the universe who made galaxies, leaves, laughter, and me and you. Do you recognize the foolishness of seeking fulfillment outside of Him? Are you ready and willing to make yourself nothing? To take the very nature of a servant? To be obedient unto death? True love requires sacrifice. What are you doing right now that requires faith? God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. If one person “wastes” away his day by spending hours connecting with God, and the other person believes he is too busy or has better things to do than worship the Creator and Sustainer, who is the crazy one? Am I loving my neighbor and my God by living where I live, by driving what I drive, by talking how I talk?” If I stop pursuing Christ, I am letting our relationship deteriorate. The way we live out our days is the way we will live our lives. What will people say about your life in heaven? Will people speak of God’s work and glory through you? And even more important, how will you answer the King when He says, “What did you do with what I gave you?

I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.

Sure, love happens," he said finally. "But it's better to be realistic so shit is not constantly blowing up in your face. And love is way more likely to blow up in your face than to bring eternal happiness. And if it doesn't hurt you, then you're the one hurting someone else. "Entering a relationship is borderline sadomasochistic. Especially when you can get everything you would from a romantic relationship from a friendship, without destroying anyone's life when it inevitably ends.

Did I ever tell you that my mother and father started out as pen pals? They wrote these long, unabashedly affectionate love letters to one another, peppered with clichés and pie-in-the-sky proclamations of eternal devotion. Despite my father’s eventual dishonesty and unfaithfulness, I have to believe he meant every word he wrote at that time, and it was admittedly romantic, uncovering my parents’ yellowed letters, all soft, crumbling corners and black ink stains, one rainy afternoon. Because how can anyone scrawl lies, really, in their own handwriting, the evidence of your own betrayal right in front of you? I sat cross-legged on the floor, holding my breath as I unfolded each letter, fragile and expectant, like a little girl opening her presents on Christmas morning. I sat there and soaked up my parents’ love for each other, and then I wondered where all those feelings had escaped to. I wondered where love went when it was lost—did it travel far, across miles and oceans and forests and deserts, or did it linger somewhere nearby, just waiting for a chance to be summoned again? Wherever it was, I could only hope it had ended up settling somewhere quieter, safer.

Rider was of the romantic mind that in this world there was only one perfect woman for him. He'd been lucky enough to find her and smart enough to marry her. He'd be damned if he'd give her up! Even if it took an eternity, he'd find her and make her love him again.

In real life women often complain about the reluctance of their male partners to engage in meaningful dialogue, but in the world of romantic fantasy heroes willingly participate in verbal discussions. They fence, they flirt, they express their anger, they talk out the confounding details of their relationships with the heroine. No hero of romance will ever respond to the eternal feminine query, "What's wrong?" with the word, "Nothing." He will tell her what's wrong; they will argue about it, perhaps, but they will be communicating, and eventually, as they resolve their various conflicts, the war of words will end. One of the most significant victories the heroine achieves at the close of the novel is that the hero is able to express his love for her not only physically but also verbally.

i've loved you since the sun first rose," he read. "Ive loved you through God send Catastrophe and manmade Disaster. I've loved you though my heart stopped beating and my eyes ran dry, through time and in spite of it, for our love has its roots in eternity and cannot fall victim to time or death. My love has no shame, no pride. it is only what it is, always has been and always will be. It is Yours. all Yours. Only Yours Gregory went cold with fear-

She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it—all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain.

Idiot!" he cried, "that from you! Here I sit, young Anthony, as I'll sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick and Gloria Gilbery go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only by my lack of emotion. I shall sit and the snow will come--oh, for a Caramel to take notes--and another winter and I shall be thirty and you and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me and singing. But after you've all gone I'll be saying things for new Dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicisms and emotions of new Anthonys--yes, and talking to new Glorias about the tans of summers yet to come." The firelight flurried up on the hearth. Maury left the window, stirred the blaze with a poker, and dropped a log upon the andirons. Then he sat back in his chair and the remnants of his voice faded in the new fire that spit red and yellow along the bark. "After all, Anthony, it's you who are very romantic and young. It's you who are infinitely more susceptible and afraid of your calm being broken. It's me who tries again and again to be moved--let myself go a thousand times and I'm always me. Nothing--quite--stirs me. "Yet," he murmured after another long pause, "there was something about that little girl with her absurd tan that was eternally old--like me.

They say you never forget your first glimpse of Gehenna. Over the tall buildings the sky swirls with orange and red, true titian, a feature of the unique atmosphere. Of course that same air would kill human beings; hence they built the entire city inside a dome. Eternal sunset, that’s why the place is so wild. You know the feeling you get, just before full dark? Sundown makes you feel like the world burgeons with possibility, and that’s Gehenna for you. Like any other romantic notion, it’s based on bullshit, of course. Gehenna isn’t the land of eternal sunset and infinite potential. The gas in the atmosphere just makes it impossible to see the sun.

LOVE IS A SUNSET Love is a feeling Best expressed through fleeting dust Across the night sky

Call it eternal optimism or romantic rebellion, but one of these days karma would stop flipping her the bird and pay it forward.

She couldn’t substitute Falco for Luca. She couldn’t substitute a series of reckless romantic moments for a life with someone honest and true.

Eternity is a long time, but only a day when you are in love.

Marriage is the commitment to make a lifetime of a love, as one will most probably be creating new life forms merged of the parents. Love is what happens when one finds someone else one respects enough to wish literally union in the form of one's irreplaceable time and possibly spawn. If you look at the process of breeding, it's quite romantic: We work, so let Another be made of Us.

He searched her eyes, and there it was. A sense of time slowing down. A world melting away with only two souls remaining. An eternity of longing. Bittersweet and desperate. Couldn’t she feel it, too?

And no matter how romantic and beautiful Greece was, I wasn't going to break my vows to Henry, even if they technically didn't apply for the next six months. I loved him no matter which season it was.

For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s Mistake—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians; its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.

I believe that love can do anything—it can change how one sees things, how one sees this world. It can turn a monster into a man or turn a man into a monster. And it has the ability to blind you. If you did love a monster, you wouldn't even know it.  Love is a powerful thing. Love can conquer death—nothing is as romantic as the thought of being eternal simply because another soul owns your heart entirely.

What’s it like to live forever? Nicholas almost dropped the glass he had been holding. “What?” “What’s it like to know you will never die?” He should have known, he thought. She was a smart woman. “Lonely.” He said answering truthfully. He sighed. “It’s not romantic, or fun, or even exciting., It’s just lonely. I have watched everyone that I have ever loved, die. My family, my friends, my lovers and neighbors. It is not a fate I would ever wish on my worst enemy.

As Ian popped the lock and opened the car door, he turned to Phoebe. “Can you do me a favour?” She immediately stepped toward him, fully embracing their new mature relationship. “Of course.” Ian looked pointedly over his own shoulder and said, “Tell me the truth. Does this car make my glowing ass look fat?” She’d naturally followed the direction of his gaze, but now she looked up, hard, into his eyes. And she smiled back at him despite herself. She even laughed. “You’re an idiot.” “When things get too serious, I get a rash.” She pointedly looked back down at his nether regions, despite the fact doing so made her blush. Still, she spoke coolly, dryly. “Not on your ass.” If Ian believed in love, that would’ve been it for him. Instantly. Enthrallingly. Eternally. Instead, he just laughed. “Thank God for that. See if there’s anything remotely clothinglike in the backseat or the trunk.

That’s the same idea that comes to us through the German Romantics, as well as out of India. To Goethe’s “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“Everything transitory is but a reference”),5 Nietzsche adds another point: “Alles Unvergängliche—das ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“All things eternal are only references as well”).

The power of a volcano is no match for the power of a soul mate. The love of soul mates is not always romantic. It is eternal and unconditional, it transcends time and space, yet it can be the love of parent and child, of best friends, of siblings, of grandparents or cousins, or many other platonic forms. Perhaps your soul mate is a college professor with whom you take a course, whose passion and knowledge for the subject he is teaching influences your own professional trajectory. Once you finish the course, you move on and so does he; your work together in this lifetime has been completed. We have families of souls, rather than just one soul mate, and we are being connected all the time. Sometimes it is only for mere moments, yet even this brief amount of time can change one’s life completely. Whether you are together for ten minutes, ten months, or ten years is not as important as the lessons that are learned, the directions, and the reminders that occur when these encounters happen.

The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von Schirach, a romantically minded young man and an energetic organizer, whose mother was an American and whose great-grandfather, a Union officer, had lost a leg at Bull Run; he told his American jailers at Nuremberg that he had become an anti-Semite at the age of seventeen after reading a book called Eternal Jew, by Henry Ford.

Be at peace, darling, be at peace, be at peace. Do you remember me? Do you remember? You are, indeed, my only and my last love. Be at peace, I am with you. Think of me, I will be with you, because you and I did not love each other only for one moment, but forever. Do you remember me? Do you remember? Do you remember? And now I feel your tears. Be at peace. It is sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet for me to sleep.

Most of our failures in love involve self-deception. The other was not all that excited about the relationship, but we projected our enthusiasm onto the other and charged ahead. Or the other was hopeful, but we were cynical and attributed that same motivation to the other. We can ignore the needs of an other because they are not impulses we feel; we can ignore warning signs because they do not fit into our vision of what should be.

Ye. Perhaps I have lived with love, not against it. Love is not just a bourgeois romantic notion of finding the one true match who will fill one's soul so full that it brims over and splashes uninterruptedly as if from some eternal pump. Love is also in this life that I've lived here in the countryside. And when I chose this life and pursued it an didn't regret it, I learned that one should stick to one's decision, nurture it and not deviate--that this is an expression of love.

I Am Here (The Sonnet) Look into my eyes, I wanna listen to your silence. Tell me of the storms unpassed, I wanna be your expression express. Tell me what you have been through, Tell me of the heartaches unhealed. Speak the pain you could never utter, I am here, I am near, you are my priority! I cannot promise you all the happiness, Nor can I promise you eternal peace. But if and when the sky crashes, I shall be your human shield. It's okay if you come late to me. I am here, I am near, I have come early.

There is little chance my two heads could have known each other in real life, but I wanted to imagine they were two lovers separated by war. The Crusades, perhaps. The Crusades seemed like a romantic, violence-soaked backdrop for this sort of thing. Maybe they were victims of a single guillotine blade during the French Revolution. Or perhaps the early American frontier—had they been scalped? I pulled back the gel ice packs to peek in. No, no, these heads had their scalps intact. Regardless, here they were, together, on their way to the eternal pyre.

Unfortunately, the eternality of the “in-love” experience is fiction, not fact. The late psychologist Dr. Dorothy Tennov conducted long-range studies on the in-love phenomenon. After studying scores of couples, she concluded that the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years. If it is a secretive love affair, it may last a little longer. Eventually, however, we all descend from the clouds and plant our feet on earth again. Our eyes are opened, and we see the warts of the other person. Her endearing “quirks” are now merely annoying. His sharp sense of humor now wounds. Those little bumps we overlooked when we were in love now become huge mountains.

No matter what the whiny poets say, love isn’t as all encompassing, eternal, and fervent as the Romantics have led us to believe. It can be compartmentalized, momentary, and considered. I can fall in love twelve times walking down the block. Once with a smile, another time with the sway of a ponytail as it bounces left to right with every step, and again with the way a girl places a hand on her boyfriend’s shoulder absentmindedly. But when we express love, when we voice a term that we all define together, we get lost. You say one thing, she hears another. Each of us tells himself a story about what this other person means. But words aren’t fixed. Words are merely containers that we pour meaning into and try to give it shape. If people could just accept that, they’d be a whole lot happier.

The emphasis on shifting essences, uncertainty, and fiercely contrasting opposite states was, of course, neither new nor unique to Byron. He and the other Romantic poets, however, took the ideas and emotions to a particularly intense extreme. Shelley's belief that poetry "marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change," and that it "subdues to union, under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things," was in sympathy not only with the views of Byron but those of Keats as well. "Negative capability," wrote Keats, exists "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching out after fact & reason." The "poetical Character," he said: has no self-it is every thing and nothing-It has no character-it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated-It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.

STARLIGHT and THUNDER The Limits of Art is an anthological collection for the ages...for a lifetime. A veritable ark containing excerpts from the sound and fury representative of the finest literary scriveners the world has yet produced. Unequivocally, intellectual nourishment breeds a fire in the mind...a conflagration of ideas and incendiary thoughts that furnish the spirit with conviction and courage to confront the ballet and ballistics of life with passion, wit, tenderness, reason, resolve, humor, imagination and unconditional curiosity. Amidst the clamor brought forth by the alarums and excursions of modern day pontifications, nevertheless, conform and commit your mind to the abolition of ignorance! Accede your sensibilities to the rapture of beauty and her ineffable grace. For beauty is enchantment, a romantic allegiance to the rhapsodic seduction celebratory of the ephemeral, the eternal and the esoteric nature and narratives of fictive splendor, which valorously emanate from this voluptuous volume. This magisterial tome is a figurative brocade of both starlight and thunder transcribed into an insatiable verbal delirium groping toward an unbridled exposition on life’s wonders and mysteries. Drink mightily from its gilded chalice.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,' are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions. 'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty.' Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful, productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities, yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and in the decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased comeliness and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that; no great drama without a noble national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that too. It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with the fire of romantic passion - the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that - but it is that, as Theophile Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, LE MONDE VISIBLE A DISPARU.

Many of my friends around the world express surprise at the Palestinian attachment to place of origin and concerns for family ties. Some even scoff at it and contrast it with their own open-armed acceptance of adventure, discovery, a nomadic lifestyle and residence in places that they choose and change according to their fancy, without the slightest regret at leaving family or even homeland behind. They remind me that the world is wider and more beautiful than 'our villages' and 'our families'. I understand this beautiful sense of the vastness of the world. Like them, I love movement, journeys, and living in new places. What these friends forget is that it is they who choose to distance themselves. They are the ones who take the decision and make the plans and then present their passports (recognized everywhere) and get on planes and trains and cars and motorcycles and go to places where three conditions that the Palestinian cannot meet are fulfilled: first, that it is their preference and choice to go to specifically these places; second, that these places always welcome them; and third and most important, that it is in their power to return to their home country whenever they desire and decide. The Palestinian forced to become a refugee, to migrate, and to go into exile from his homeland in the sixty years since the Nakba of 1948, or the forty since the June 1967 War, suffers miseries trying to obtain a document by which he will be recognized at borders. He suffers miseries trying to obtain a passport from another state because he is stateless and has to go through Kafkaesque interrogations before being granted entry visa to any place in the world, even the Arab states. The Palestinian is forbidden to enter his own country by land, sea, or air, even in a coffin. It is not a matter of romantic attachment to a place but of eternal exclusion from it. The Palestinian stripped of an original identity is a palm tree broken in the middle. My foreign friends have control over the details of their lives but a single Israeli solder can control the details of the life of any Palestinian. This is the difference. This is the story.

A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has today become the political centre of the world we see here all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard. The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bear as a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists will have no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form, while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at least the Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions of their own? Never mind, these variations matter very little compared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made at once specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquant spectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol. ...If we are concerned with fisherman, it is not the type of fishing which is whown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, a romantic essense of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: to identify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences of refugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.

Love’s space In the distance, not too far but far enough, I had once seen her walking with someone, And that single, casual visual encounter was enough, To think of her always and that mysterious someone, They walked for a while and then sat under a tree, There they spoke of past while they were still discovering the present, And I wondered of my own future under the tree, Long after they had left, when I was dealing with my own present, I had somehow anchored my likings on her, My thoughts always felt her presence, She was there under the tree and I was with her, Although in reality she was exploring her own present in that someone’s presence, Yet I loved to return to the tree and be there for hours, Thinking of her and the future that could be, Her and mine, just ours, and then it would create for us unending hours, I so deeply wished if it could be, only if it could be, The tree is there, the stream too, I am always there between the stream and the tree, They both know it too, But what I wish for the girl and myself, the stream wishes for the tree, So whenever I am under the tree thinking of her, The stream flows by looking at the motionless and stationary tree, And then both remind me of her, Both the stream and the tree, Now it is winter and the stream has frozen, Just like the tree, motionless and anchored in eternity of nowhere, And in me, just like the stream, her thoughts and feelings are frozen, Because she now is the everywhere and everything in my emotional state called nowhere, Like the stream that to express her feelings of love towards the never moving tree, Froze itself completely and turned still, To feel the feelings of her darling and ever still tree, That even in her frozen state she loves still, in ways silent and still, So I share the stream’s irony or maybe I share the trees stillness, Its silence, where it quietly discloses that it never moves anywhere because it loves the stream, That always flows through its roots of love, and when the tree feels this romantic stillness, It decides to lie anchored on the banks of the stream, to enjoy his love’s accessible stream, And I feel the same for her whenever I am under the tree, Or with the stream that flows beside it, For she still exists there, frozen for my sake by the always still tree, And her reflection too is frozen in the running water of the stream, and I love feeling the wonder of it, All of it, the stream, the tree, she; and her frozen reflection in the stream’s water, And whenever I am here, the tree bends a bit, the stream slows her pace, And I see her beautiful face in the flowing water, the stream’s clear water, And then I too slow down my life’s pace, in this love’s own space, where time always loses its pace!

Structurally, then, errors of love are similar to errors in general. Emotionally, however, they are in a league of their own: astounding, enduring, miserable, incomprehensible. True, certain other large-scale errors can rival or even dwarf them; we’ve gotten a taste of that in recent chapters. But relatively few of us will undergo, for example, the traumatic and total abandonment of a deeply held religious belief, or the wrongful identification of an assailant. By contrast, the vast majority of us will get our hearts seriously broken, quite possibly more than once. And when we do, we will experience not one but two kinds of wrongness about love. The first is a specific error about a specific person—the loss of faith in a relationship, whether it ended because our partner left us or because we grew disillusioned. But, as I’ve suggested, we will also find that we were wrong about love in a more general way: that we embraced an account of it that is manifestly implausible. The specific error might be the one that breaks our heart, but the general one noticeably compounds the heartache. A lover who is part of our very soul can’t be wrong for us, nor can we be wrong about her. A love that is eternal cannot end. And yet it does, and there we are—mired in a misery made all the more extreme by virtue of being unthinkable. We can’t do much about the specific error—the one in which we turn out to be wrong about (or wronged by) someone we once deeply loved. (In fact, this is a good example of a kind of error we can’t eliminate and shouldn’t want to.) But what about the general error? Why do we embrace a narrative of love that makes the demise of our relationships that much more shocking, humiliating, and painful? There are, after all, less romantic and more realistic narratives of love available to us: the cool biochemical one, say, where the only heroes are hormones; the implacable evolutionary one, where the communion of souls is supplanted by the transmission of genes; or just a slightly more world-weary one, where love is rewarding and worth it, but nonetheless unpredictable and possibly impermanent—Shakespeare’s wandering bark rather than his fixèd mark. Any of these would, at the very least, help brace us for the blow of love’s end. But at what price? Let go of the romantic notion of love, and we also relinquish the protection it purports to offer us against loneliness and despair. Love can’t bridge the gap between us and the world if it is, itself, evidence of that gap—just another fallible human theory, about ourselves, about the people we love, about the intimate “us” of a relationship. Whatever the cost, then, we must think of love as wholly removed from the earthly, imperfect realm of theory-making. Like the love of Aristophanes’ conjoined couples before they angered the gods, like the love of Adam and Eve before they were exiled from the Garden of Eden, we want our own love to predate and transcend the gap between us and the world.

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I don’t know why anyone thinks looking at the stars is so romantic,” he said. “Have they ever read Greek mythology? It’s all the same story—God sees mortal, God desires mortal, mortal suffers gruesome fate and is rewarded with an eternity of pain in the cosmos.” He shrugged. “You could always make up your own stories.” But she was already shaking her head. “No. Those stories are written in stardust millions of years old. I don’t think I get to change them.” “Then I’m thankful for light pollution,” he said.

Romantic love morphs into a loving and eternal relationship if we understand what is love; why passion is such a sweet word.

The habit is, for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to see each other for a few times and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to vow to each other eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake... The institution of marriage is a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgements in the daily affair of their life, must always have a crippled judgement in every other concern... Add to this, that marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties... So long as I seek to engross one woman to myself, and to prohibit my neighbour from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am guilty of the most odious of all monopolies.

To say in my culture, ‘God loves me,’ sounds rather romantic and unrealistic. It is the hardest thing for me to accept. In fact, I wonder if the root of much ungodliness in our lives, the root of our idols, the root of our adulterous thoughts and actions, the root of our addictions, the root of our pride, the root of our rebellion against God, is the fundamental resistance to the true love of the eternal Son of God for us.

I, inside you! ( Part 1 ) It was quite and still, Though she lay beside me, The room did with a sense of coziness fill, As I looked at her and she looked at me, Even the winking of the eyes had ceased, For it disturbed the rhyme of our feelings, Love in our life had doubtlessly increased, Inspite of times passing moments and their wanton stealings, So, she did not wink and neither did I, We lay there still, covered in the morning light, I was glad that finally I could say, it was I who she loved, just I, Not winking, hearts throbbing, in that embrace tight, The warm sunbeams pierced through the curtain, And lit the corners and walls of the room, It was love, it was eternity, it was everything, it was romantic, of it I was now certain, And then like a bright Summer rose her body and her feelings over mine did bloom, I did not want to wink anymore, Because I did not want to miss her beauty even for a split second, She loved me, I loved her, she kissed me, I kissed her just like always and before, She was silent, she was passionate, she was a beautiful woman in love with nothing to pretend, And with every new beam of light invading the room, She held me tighter and drew me closer, It felt like Summer beauty was the bride and I was its sole groom, And how loved I felt being with her, Almost like the Autumn mist that spreads itself around everything, She grew over me, Till in this state of eternal everything I felt like nothing, And it did not matter as long as she was kissing me, Time was waiting at the door, The destiny was knocking on the sunshine kissed walls, Cupid was busy shooting arrows of absolute amour, But now we were nowhere, because like the sunshine we hung everywhere in the room made of love walls,

You Are My Spring Joy Where does life seek eternity? Not in daily struggles or toil, but in that endearing destiny, Where thoughts, pursuits, likings all merge to create a happy existence, Where happiness leaps from every act and every substance. Just like spring flowers that spread joy, To all alike: a woman, a man, a little girl and a young boy, They live for moments very brief, Yet they always manage to delight the heart immersed in grief. They last for a day or moments few, With a promise that next year they shall bloom anew, Leaving behind sweet memories and hopes profound, And even in a moment of existence they live in eternity that time’s snares can not confound. Similarly my love Irma, your smiles, your beauty nourish my existence, You, your love, your endless beauty are what I need for sustenance, My eternity lies in you, and only you, Eternity will be virtueless if it is not spent thinking about you and loving you. I seek thee with all my senses and my mind and heart, From me the reflections of your beauty never depart, And I lie wrapped in them day and night, Without the glimpse of your beautiful smile I cannot establish the brightness in any form of light. Perhaps someday the sun may not rise, And the Moon may not shine , to me it shall be no surprise, But for me living without loving you is not possible, As for the Moon to shine without the Sun is impossible. So let us be like the Sun and the moonshine, Where both exist to create the life giving sunshine and the romantic moonshine, You be a daffodil, winter jasmine, iris, primrose and be merry and always sing, And I promise, I will always be the unfailing Spring, just your Spring!

Your special someone! In the vastness of her inner mind, In the confines of her selective memories, In the visions of her eyes refined, I want to discover our love stories, In the blinking of her eyelids, In the movement of her hands, In the flickering of her lips and their deliberate wet slides, I wish to create our empire of love lands, In the mere act of her standing and doing nothing, Just standing there staring at time, In her thoughts, in her feelings, and in her everything, I want to be her companion, or a mere shadow always cast on her moment of time, In the idleness of her mind and its moments of thinking, In the days of her life and the nights of her dreams, In the smile that springs from her face when her beautiful eyes are blinking, I wish to be her happy dreams and those infinite love beams, In her playful mood, in her pensive moments, In her feelings that originate from somewhere within her, In her heart beats and her life’s pavements, I want to be her blissful destiny, just like a feeling always living within her, In the moments of her secret confessions, When her heart secretly talks to her mind, In her secret love breeding sessions, I wish to be her passion, her emotion, her feeling, her everything that she wishes to find, In her North, her South, her East and in her West, In her quest to seek her moment of glory, In the adventures of her heart where she is the best, I wish to be the beginning and the end of her life’s every story, In the day when she is awake, And during the night when she is asleep, In the silence of her mind, where she, her darling worlds does make, I wish to be her treasure, her feelings, that always towards me leap, In the sensitivity of her actions, In the beauty that glows on her beautiful face, In her simple, yet charming attractions, I wish to be that ingredient of eternal grace, In the silence of her room, In the tender fluttering of her window curtains, In the beauty of her Summer bloom, I wish to be her heart’s only happy bulletins, In the tip-toeing of her feet, In the humming of her favorite song, In the relaxing rhythm of her every heart-beat, I wish to be her movement, leading her to my heart and memories, where she truly does belong, In the feelings of her passionate kiss, In the passions of her midnight dreams, In the moments of her sensual bliss, I wish to be her desire, and the loveliest dream, that so real seems, In the sunshine of the beautiful Summer day, In the calm of the warm Summer night, In the sweet corner of her room, where, she her dreams of passion does display, I wish to be her anxiety, and her love’s delight, In that every thought where she thinks of someone, In that step that she takes towards that special someone, In her need to be with someone, Irma, I wish to be the only one, that special someone!

Circles Circles, small, large and many circles, That is what our lives are like, Always moving and pacing in circles, Circles of love, circles of desire, circles of passion , too many circles, but none alike. Situations, circumstances presenting themselves in circles, With infinite loops, where we always end up where we began, With the only difference that we change circles, but never can we leave these circles, Even if we tried hard and we desperately ran. We always end up in a circle within many circles, But be assured these loops have been created on purpose by someone, Who enjoys watching us going in circles because for him/her life is a circus of circles, There is no regard for emotions, sentiments and human sensitivities, because this entity seems to care for no one. And casts us mercilessly and relentlessly in these vicious circles, Where the race begins never to end, because in a circle the end is unmarked, And ah the agony of living in ceaseless pain and its ever extending circles, Who shall we accuse, our fate or our destiny that we always get marked. To be a part of circles, in relentless motion and desperation, only to create new circles, And be cast in them remorselessly by this unknown entity, It has nothing to offer us, no joys, no celebrations, just the ceaseless circles, Where we always lie in the centre like a loathed deity! And if ever our circle intersects with a cluster of happy circles, We are cast away and shunned like a managed dog, Till there are no more happy circles left in our constellation of endless circles, And we get recast by fate once again , in the infinite circle of life where we belong. We, our circle, our lives, our pain, a little blend of joy, and our live’s moments going in circles, Often question us in our wakeful state, “What are we and who are we without these circles?” And the answer, “ a motion within a circle seeking its eternal kinetic state !” To love in a circle, to feel joy in a circle, to confront life within circles, And tread in a state of constantly moving inertia, Where the quantum of everything is defined by these ceaselessly evolving circles, With the purpose to attain panacea! And I have loved you even in these circles, Where the feelings of my mind and heart are these constantly geminating circles, Your circles, my circles, our circles, life’s circles, circles within circles, To be a part of that final circle, we call “life’s circles!” So, I have plucked this rose with infinite red petals, For when we enter the circle of life together, I shall shower these scented petals, In all our circles to create that quintessential and romantic weather. where we shall enjoy our life in these circles, without feeling their drag, For being with you in the life’s endless sequence of circles, Will be a moment of joy, where I would wish that time developed a perpetual lag, So that you and I , could feel the symphony of our rhythmically moving circles!

Our universe of love! Let us wander like these carefree clouds, All across the sky, Let us create love’s heart beats and its sounds, And then let the two hearts freely fly, Like these clouds in the sky, Where love abounds, And we float like these clouds by and by, To create a feeling that knows no bounds, Where there is only one destiny, The eternity of you and me, And as time every creation confounds in its final act of tyranny, And nothing exists now between you and me, Neither the space, nor time or light, For now there shall only be, You and me, no space, no time and no light, An endless you floating through the infinite me, In this state of nothingness and eternal silence, Then as your heart beats for me Irma, and mine for thee, We shall rescue the universe from this sentence, And create a universe for you and me, By lending it our heart beats, Then as the romantic sound waves travel through the darkness, And the darkness finally retreats, Then the universe gets created in its loveliness, And in it Irma, lie our heart beats, In every atom, every corner, every ray of light, And as my passion your passions meets, We become our own and the universe’s infinite delight, Where now we are what universe is, And the universe is our creation, For whatever there is, It is only our heart beats, our feelings and our single sensation, That lies in this universe of everything, But for you and me, it is our abode of love, And whenever you whisper and I hear something, It is the whisper of endless love, your and just our love, Where the stars are formed every moment, And the universe expands at its happy pace, It develops few feelings benevolent, And creates for you and me, our secret space, That lies beyond the limits of time, Where even light sees nothing, For lovers love to reside in infinite moments of time, Where even a small thing has the potential to be the God of everything, Just like our love that for now is the creator of the universe, Where our love thrives and travels everywhere, You within me while I flow within you, and together we traverse, To finally lie in our secret somewhere, that for everyone else is nowhere, only for you and me always there somewhere!

Her Her thoughts fall like rain drops from somewhere above, And they remind me of her and our moments of love, Her memories rain as kisses covering my every thought, And they remind me of the battles of love by us together fought, Her smiles spread like the sunshine that lights up everything, And among this array of things, my heart too is one thing, Her eyes steal every view floating in my vision, And it feels like the most welcome treason, Her voice sounds like a conversation between the rose and a butterfly, And I wish she were a butterfly and this rose were I, Her presence feels like the most beautiful wonder of reality, And when I look at her, she appears to be bathed in superlative sublimity, Her tenderly moving lips remind me of Eden, And I wonder if she is the one, originally created by God as the most beautiful maiden, Her movements feel like romantic shaking of flowers by the slow breeze, To watch her in this graceful act puts my heart and mind at an eternal ease, Her expressions that adorn her face, Make me believe, that it is in her, Eden somehow hid its every grace, Her everything, her every act, her every movement, Wants me to steal her from time’s every moment, Her wonder invades me subtly and then completely, And I claim, “Irma I love you totally!

I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain. Catherine Breillat

No one is interested with your past, non-professional relationship with Agent Harris, Detective Garner.” I cut them off. Seriously, nobody wants to hear it (I know I do not), since it is probably a perfect fairy tale of a prodigy guy and prodigy girl, and together they catch bad guys while looking excessively beautiful at doing it. They look so majestic side by side, like prom king and queen from some cheesy coming-of-age movie where they dance flawlessly and sing like pro despite that it’s their first gig. Also, their eyes sparkle. It takes a long, sort-of out-of-sense explanation why eyes can figuratively sparkle, but it just does. You know in romantic comedy movie where the guy stares far away and then he is smiling when he finally makes a decision involving the only girl he wants to spend eternity with? And girl when she meets a boy band member? Yeah, that’s how they look at each other. Jemma looks at this guy like how girl looks at boy (ah, it even sounds sexist in my head), but not at me. She looks like me like I am a special case that she wants to solve. She looks at me like she's trying to find my eyes (which is, always there, I don't know why it is so hard for her to see a pair of black dots above my nose), and maybe I am a little bit irritated because this Harris guy breathes and just like that, you can see the grace in Garner--how big, mushy twinkie, of a person she really is. Also, I am definitely irritated because Jemma's ex is terrifyingly perfect, it's alarming, but then there's me. She's settling down with me. I feel insecure and I do not like that feeling. So, like a literal five years old child, I stroll between them, ruining their unexpected reunion (hey, doesn't anyone want to talk about how Harris tracked down all cases at JCPD so he can jump into whatever his ex is currently working on? This is not reunion, it's stalking) and offer him a handshake. At the time like this, I wish I had electricity running through my palm. I probably couldn’t end this Harris guy’s life, but at least I could give his perfect blond hair a ‘struck by lightning’ makeover. “Hi, Detective Irving. Homicide Unit. Strategic Expert. By the way, I’m good at combining them, you know.” I introduce myself. Which is true, I can be writing a mental note on how to eliminate this threat in my head for all he knows. “Strategy, and murder. I can mix them up.

The folk of Riverton have all been dead so long. While age has withered me, they remain eternally youthful, eternally beautiful. There now. I am becoming maudlin and romantic. For they are neither young nor beautiful. They are dead. Buried. Nothing. Mere figments that flit within the memories of those they once knew. But of course, those who live in memories are never really dead. The first time

The drive to the airport felt eternal. Jane turned the backseat radio to a rock station and worked hard at being more angry than sad. Angry was proactive. “Schmuck,” she kept muttering. It was at herself. Yes, Martin was a schmuck, too. The sheer certainty of that felt invigorating. But really, after all those boyfriends, you’d think she’d have learned that all men are schmucks. It didn’t help her humiliation much that she’d had no illusions about Martin. She knew that he’d just been a fling, motivated by her desperation to feel like a genuine woman amid the pageantry. But then she went and let herself get played. Stupid girl. She’d even convinced herself that Mr. Nobley might have been actually fond of her. “Dream on,” the radio crooned. “It doesn’t matter how it ended,” she muttered to herself, and realized that it was true. Real or not, Martin had showed her that contented spinsterhood was not an option. And real or not, Mr. Nobley had helped her say no to Mr. Darcy. She leaned her head against the window, watched the countryside go whirling by, and forced herself to smile. Pembrook Park had done its job--it allowed her to live through her romantic purgatory. She believed now in earnest that fantasy is not practice for what is real--fantasy is the opiate of women. And she’d buried her fantasy behind her in the English countryside. Her life now would be open to real possibilities. There was no Mr. Darcy, there was no perfect man. But there might be someone. And she’d be ready.

2012 Andy’s Correspondence   Young, Young, Young, you do have a way with words. Your seductive writing is temptation for me to lust after you, not to mention your romantic description of our lovemaking. You’ve charmed me to irresistible covetousness. LOL!               None of my other charges had the magnetism that you did. I’m sure you knew that during our time together. As much as I adored Albert, I was not smitten by him as with you. It would be cynical of me to say I don’t feel the connection you and I shared even to this day. Love never dissipates but grows with each passing day. This emotion lies dormant and buried within our subconscious until the right moment triggers its resurgence. I believe you already know my sentiment. Need I say more?☺               The poppy-field experience was just one of many soul connections we shared in our journey through oneness and unity. As Laozi wrote in the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao; as soon as it is named, a dichotomy is created, and it is lost. Oneness means just that: only one. The instant we label or name it, it’s something else — it’s no longer unity…

That’s so sweet.” “So says the romance novel reader.” “You have something against romance, Callahan?” “Not at all. I have something against schmaltz.” “Schmaltz! That wasn’t schmaltz.” “Darlin’, that picnic was the epitome of schmaltz.” “All right then, Casanova. What should Harry have done to romance his lady?” Gabe stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. He linked his hands behind his head and considered the question. “The bouquet was way overdone. A single rose would be okay, or even better, whatever flower she considered her favorite. Hiring a violinist to ride behind the courting buggy ruined the whole thing.” “Now, why would you say that? It’s terribly romantic.” “You like threesomes, do you?” “What? No!” Gabe chuckled and continued, “A mountain meadow picnic was good, but a linen-draped table? Fine china? Roast duckling? No. Way too formal. Too stuffy. All you need for a romantic mountain meadow picnic is a quilt to spread on the grass and a picnic basket with finger foods. The champagne was a good idea, but it’d have been better if he’d put it to chill in the creek.” “That’s a good idea,” Nic agreed. “What about the poetry and the dancing?” “Depends on the woman, of course. If she’s into that, then yeah. Nothing’s wrong with poetry or dancing.” “What do you do for music if you’ve left the violinist back in town?” “If a guy can carry a tune at all, he can sing softly, or hum. You can dance to birdsong or music in your mind, as far as that goes.” She let that sit a minute, then said, “That’s not bad, Callahan. Not bad at all.” He

The parasail's winch turned, winding up the line, pulling Ally and Serena lower and closer to him in a steady pull. A funny feeling seized him as he watched her. Logically, he knew she kept getting closer, but he suddenly knew she’d never arrive. She’d be suspended out on the end of that line for eternity, seemingly within reach, yet somehow distant. His breath stopped.

...he remained steadfast in the idea that love is the only thing worth waiting for an eternity.

He took hold of my arm, and swung me around. “For one thing, I still owe you eternal servitude for saving my life, remember? And for another, the subway station’s that way, stupid. Let’s go.” There isn’t anything in the least romantic about being called stupid. Really. Especially since I knew there was no way Zach would ever be interested in a red-haired, violin-playing preacher’s daughter when there was the remotest chance he could have gorgeous, physical-therapist-in-training Petra. So

Justin Case and women do not mix. Man boobs, a love of Kings and Castles, and being tight with the "nerd" crowd certainly don't win him any points either. After rescuing Katie, his crush, it turns out she might not be the girl he thought she was, while Elyssa, the school's Goth Girl, turns out to be more. Can high school get any more confusing? Determined to improve himself, he joins a gym and meets a sexy girl that just oozes a "come hither, Justin" vibe. Until she attacks him in the parking lot, and Justin realizes she's no ordinary girl but a being with supernatural speed and strength. After a narrow escape and an excruciating migraine headache, he wakes up with supernatural abilities all his own: speed, strength, and the ability to seduce every woman he sees. While that might sound like the perfect combo for any hormonal teen, Justin is a hopeless romantic who wants his first time to be special. Is that too much to ask for? But he doesn't know what he is or how to stop his carnal urges. One thing is clear: If he doesn't find answers there are other more sinister supernaturals who would like nothing better than to make him their eternal plaything and do far worse than kill him.

Every year the memory vomits up again, especially after every move. Love of our kind requires so much amnesia. Despite his eternal apologies. Despite how far we’ve come, how we’ve both changed, grown, our bond strengthened, one of now mutual respect, constant communication. For I love him yes I love him but ours is not a romantic tale of origins. Of how we came to be.

Victor Hugo's mighty settings where dream figures immeasurably larger than life stalked through an everlasting battle of antitheses, had carried them away by their epic sweep and sent them gesticulating to watch the sun go down behind ruins or to watch life go by in the false but superb lighting of a Romantic fifth act. Then Musset had come and overwhelmed them with his passion and his tears...a new, more human world had opened before them, conquering them through pity and the eternal cry of anguish they were to associate henceforth with every mortal thing. (31)

I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.

She wanted to be alive and mortal and eternally temporary with him, and that was why she cried. [i love that this isn't in any sort of romantic context]

Faith is having peace while facing the unknown. God’s glory can be seen in tragedy. We don’t live for the satisfaction found in this world. Our satisfaction will be found in heaven. Our hearts grieve for today, but our soul has hope in eternity.