Lois McMaster Bujold on Love

"It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart’s hope. It was what I wanted to be."

"I don’t know what passion he inspires in you—were you lovers? You’d be amazed how many people have clones made for that purpose."

"Kareen was by no means sure Mark was a potential husband. He was still working his heart out on becoming a potential human being."

"A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter."

"Miles was no musician, but even he could sense an intensity of passion in the playing that went beyond talent, reaching for genius."

"I’m sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you."

"Mother Nature gives a sense of romance to young people, in place of prudence, to advance the species. It’s a trick—that makes us grow."

"You couldn’t be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you’d been abused into affecting public humility."

"Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can’t trade for your heart’s desire is your heart."

"What an obituary. When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than, “He didn’t hit me."

"So in the physics of the heart, distance is relative; it’s time that’s absolute."

"Even love is not as strong as habit, eh?"

"Let me help. Rhymes with I love you, right?"

"He knew now why they called it “falling in love.” There was the same nauseating vertigo of free fall, the same vast exhilaration, the same sick certainty of broken bones upon impact with a rapidly rising reality."

"Surely she was mad. She didn’t feel anything, no grief or remorse, though her heart was racing and her breath came in gasps. A shocky combat-high, that immortal rush that made men charge machine guns. So this was what the war-addicts came for."