“I think we all just want someone who can see the beauty we can’t see in ourselves.”— Maxwell Diawuoh, maxwelldpoetry.wordpress.com
“Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the 'right' person.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“We speak of 'love' as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural--and dangerous--fixation on the former.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“It happens much as he remembers it from before, that first span with someone new. If he could collect every such scene from across his past and put them together on a single loop, the total running time might be no more than half an hour, yet these would in many ways be the finest moments of his lif…”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“He will experience similarly bittersweet longings for other lost soul mates spotted on buses, in the aisles of grocery stores, and in the reading rooms of libraries.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soul mate. We needn't have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. What matters instead is intuition, a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect…”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“He has never felt anything remotely like this before. The sensation overwhelms him from the first. It isn't dependent on words, which they will never exchange. It is as if he has in some way always known her, as if she holds out an answer to his very existence, and, especially, to a zone of confused…”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“When you look at me and smile it's like for a split second everything stops and your smile pierces through all of the bad in life and all is well again.”— 11anothergirl11, 11anothergirl11.tumblr.com
“He indulged it at first, trying to be a good man, trying to live up to an ideal image that he, too, still had of himself, but there was finally no way around it: endless discussion with a humorless twenty-three-year-old bored him. During the day, when they were apart, he kept picturing her solemn ga…”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.com