This city has so many beautiful women. I fall in love like every ten minutes, I'm sitting on the subway, I'm like, "There's my wife... there she is - oh, she's getting off. All right, there's the woman - all right, that's a man."
The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.
My love grows wide and shallow in an effort to spread my losses.
I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul.
To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.
You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.
Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
It's so much easier to convince yourself you're madly in love with someone when you know nothing about him.
