Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame. ~Henry David Thoreau

It seems to me that we could all benefit from a post on love. As romance authors, love is essential to our stories. Not only that, but with all the division in the country and the world these days, a little more love would go a long way toward healing. I've been thinking about some of my favorite quotes, and decided to pair them with lovely pics of our garden taken by my daughter, Elise. Of course, while looking for familiar quotes, I came across new ones. This quote from dear Mister Rogers says a lot:

“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” 

― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember 

A baby is born with a need to be loved — and never outgrows it. ~Frank A. Clark

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. ~George Moore

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. ~Robert Heinlein

 Who, being loved, is poor? ~Oscar Wilde

We loved with a love that was more than love. ~Edgar Allan Poe

A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasn’t put there to stay -
Love isn’t love
'Til you give it away.
~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. ~Henry Van Dyke

Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves. ~John Bulwer

You know you have found love when you can't find your way back. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

While duty measures the regard it owes

With scrupulous precision and nice justice,
Love never reasons, but profusely gives,
Gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all,
And trembles then, lest it has done too little.
~Hannah More


Take away love and our earth is a tomb. ~Robert Browning

Love.... Its eternal goal is life.... No one who has ever brought up a child can doubt for a moment that love is literally the life-giving fluid of human existence. ~Smiley Blanton, quoted in Woman's Home Companion, 1956

I don't think you can keep someone you truly love at arm's length on purpose, they'll always end up in your arms. ~Holly Nichole Miller


Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. ~William Shakespeare, "Sonnet CXVI"

***We have children, kitties, and geese in among our many growing things. We try to keep the geese out of the garden, though. My grandbaby Owen is in our sunflower forest above and this is Owl Cat below. My DH snapped this shot of her. Elise took the rest.