The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!
Interpretation
Acceptance in love diminishes the allure of desire and pursuit.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the thrill and charm of romantic pursuit often resides in the chase, rather than in the actual acceptance of love. When a lover is fully accepted, the mystical allure of the beloved can diminish, as they become more accessible and less of an unattainable ideal, thereby affecting the dynamics of attraction and desire in a relationship.
In practice
A couple might reflect on this quote during a romantic dinner to discuss how their initial attraction has evolved.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.
A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.
I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.
you can't kill love. you can't even kill it with hate. you can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. you can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.
She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed--necessary but scarcely noticed.
We all know that the people we love are mortal, we all know we’re mortal, we know it’s going to end; you cannot prepare yourself for it.
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