Total Perspective Vortex

But you assume it’s always a choice, conscious, decision. This isn’t just a little naïve, Rémy? You sit down with your little accountant’s ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?.. What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?

—Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

There are some people who begin the Zoo at the beginning, called WAYIN, and walk as quickly as they can past every cage until they get to the one called WAYOUT, but the nicest people go straight to the animal they love the most, and stay there.

—Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne

Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

—Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?

—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren’t on our lists, people we’ve never met but still want to protect. We need pockets big enough for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.

—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

—Emily Dickinson

Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.

—Paul Eldridge