Unrequited Love

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

What a woman says to an eager lover, / write it on running water, write it on air.

Take love when love is given, / But never think to find it / A sure escape from sorrow / Or a complete repose.

O, beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?

Though 1 know he loves me, / Tonight my heart is sad; / His kiss was not so wonderful / As all the dreams I had.

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how that can be? / I know not, but I feel the agony.

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it, and am in agony.

I hold it true, what’re befall feel it, when I sorrow most ‘is better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

 

O Love, O fire! once he drew

 

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

 

In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

 

On account of it [“the Love that dare not speak its name”] I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him.

The “Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare.

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing. This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near to death.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young woman, it is boldness.

What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Twenty love-sick maidens we, Love-sick all against our will.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

How do you know that love is gone? If you said that you would be there at seven, you get there by nine and he or she has not called the police yet—it’s gone.