All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope isgone.

-Austen,Jane
  Persuasion, ch.23.

Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving.

-Browning, Robert
  Men and Women,'One Word More. To E.B.B.', stanza 5.

Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 162

-Browning, Robert
  Dramatis Personae,'Caliban upon Setebos', stanza1.

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry.

-Donne,John
c.1595^1605  'The Triple Fool', collected in Songs and Sonnets (1633).

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.

-Freud, Sir Clement
  In the Observer, 27 Dec.

A Gay VietnamVeteranöThey gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one.

-Matlovich, Leonard
Tombstone inscription. Quoted in the Washington Post, 22  Apr 1988.

The point is the seeingöthe grace beyond recognition, the ways of the bird rising, unnamed, unknown, beyond the range of language, beyond its noun. Eyes open on growing, flying, happening, and go on opening. Manifold, the world dawns on unrecognizing, realizing eyes. Amazement is the thing. Not love, but the astonishment of loving.

-Reid, Alastair
  Weathering,'Growing, Flying, Happening'.

   Loving in truth, and vain in verse my love to show, That she (dear she) mighttake some pleasure of my pain, Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know; Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain.

-Shute, Nevil originally Nevil Shute Norway
Astrophel and Stella, sonnet1.

On cesse de s'aimer si quelqu'un ne nous aime. We stop loving ourselves when no one loves us.

-Stae«  l, Germaine Necker, Baronne de
  De l'Allemagne.

I love to be envied, and would not marry a wife that I alone could love; loving alone is as dull as eating alone.

-Wycherley,William
  The CountryWife, act 3, sc.2.