Letitia Elizabeth Landon on Love

"Pattern love-letter — "I — I — I — you — you — you ; you — you — you — I — I — I," garnished with loves and doves ad libitum."

"In moments of great anxiety there is a sort of natural superstition about the heart, which the reason rejects in cooler moments."

"But the passion of jealousy cannot exist without the passion of love, and is like its parent, creative, impetuous, and credulous."

"No one makes the heart of a little home circle entirely their own, without some very sweet gifts of nature — we must love to be beloved."

"How often will the lip frame some indifferent question, when the heart is full of the most important!"

"Hope deferred is sickness to the heart — and she was now suffering that sickness, at its worst."

"There are always an ample sufficiency of compassionate neighbours ready to console one who, by common consent, is styled "the disconsolate widower."

"I believe the love of flowers to be as inherent in the disposition as any other inclination."

"I do not believe that affection can exist with truth, without the ideal, and without blending with itself all that is best and most earnest in our nature."

"The discharge of a duty from affection is the best solace for sorrow."

"Deception is always an evil, but in youth — youth, whose very faults should be open-hearted and impetuous, it lays the foundation of the worst possible faults of character."

"To know yourself less beloved than you love, is a dreadful feeling"

"—true love is like religion, it hath its silence and its sanctity."

"How strong is the love of the country in all indwellers of towns !"

"Delicious tears! the heart's own dew."

"... who cares for a general compliment more than a general lover."

"We step not over the threshold of childhood till led by Love"

": Yes, I have killed her at last. They thought I did not know her, but I did. She took away my father's heart from me, and would have taken away my husband's; but I have killed her at last."

"A light compliment was never yet breathed by love."

"Childhood whose very happiness is love."

"Courage is like an angel at my heart !"

"Oh, nothing has the memory of love!"

"He had married for love, under the frequent delusion of supposing that love will last under every circumstance most calculated to destroy it ; and, secondly, that it can supply the place of everything else."

"But as our explanation will be more brief than one broken in upon by words of wonder, regret, and affection, we will proceed to it ; holding that explanation, like advice, should be of all convenient shortness."

"I like to be candid in my admissions — it is so very disarming ; you forestall the objection which you admit — at least your adversary has scarcely the heart to push to its utmost the advantage which you so meekly confess."

"It is the mistake of a coxcomb, whose experience of affection is all to come—if it ever comes—to say that women are won by mere good looks. Though it does not owe its birth to them. Gratitude and Vanity are the nurses that rock the cradle of Love."

"Other sorrows soften the heart, — poverty hardens it. Nothing like poverty for chilling the affections and repressing the spirits. Its annoyances are all of the small and mean order ; its regrets all of a selfish kind ; its presence is perpetual ; and the scant meal, and the grudged fire, are repeated day by day, yet who can become accustomed to them ?"

": Nothing like love-letters for filling up a rainy morning. A mistress gives a man such an interest in himself! You cannot run your fingers through your hair, without a vision of the locket wherein one of your curls reposes on the fairest neck in the world. An east-wind only conjures up a host of "sweet anxieties ;" and if the worst comes to the worst, you can sit down and write sonnets to your inamorata's eyebrow."

"A woman whose lover resigns her, and as if for her own sake, though without consulting her, is placed in a most awkward situation. What can she do ? Take him at his word ? That is easy to say, but hard to do, when all the hopes and affections are garnered in his love."

"On this subject any general rule is impossible ; love, like the chamelion, is coloured by the air in which it lives — and the finer the air the richer the colour. Some young ladies have a happy facility of falling in and out of love; their heart, like a raspberry tart, is covered with crosses."