Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
Interpretation
Love is a powerful and transformative force that can separate our past from our future.
In this quote, Lauren Oliver captures the essence of love as both delicate and potent, likening it to a razor's edge that fundamentally alters one's life. It emphasizes that love can divide one's existence into 'before' and 'after,' highlighting its significant impact and the way it can overshadow everything else around us.
In practice
In a wedding toast, highlighting how love changes lives.
My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.
If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.
That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.
It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.
But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.
It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.
I was a heavy heart to carry_x000D_ My beloved was weighed down_x000D_ My arms around his neck_x000D_ My fingers laced to crown._x000D_ I was a heavy heart to carry_x000D_ My feet dragged across ground_x000D_ And he took me to the river_x000D_ Where he slowly let me drown_x000D_ My love has concrete feet_x000D_ My love's an iron ball_x000D_ Wrapped around your ankles _x000D_ Over the waterfall
A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.
You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play.
This is how it works _x000D_ You peer inside yourself _x000D_ You take the things you like _x000D_ And try to love the things you took _x000D_ And then you take that love you made _x000D_ And stick it into some _x000D_ Someone else's heart _x000D_ Pumping someone else's blood.
I fell in love with music by listening to R&B, & it's the core of who I am.
Witch, do this for me, Find me a moon made of longing. Then cut it sliver thin, and having cut it, hang it high above my beloved's house, so that she may look up tonight and see it, and seeing it, sigh for me as I sigh for her, moon or no moon.
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