Today is St George’s Day. Which is the national day of England, however we don’t celebrate it much because those who do often do so with xenophobic intentions. Not to say it can’t be celebrated nicely, but we don’t have any lasting cultural traditions related to this day.
However, it is also celebrated as the Valentine’s Day of Catalonia, as I experienced last year. In their celebration of George who fought a dragon to rescue a princess; the girls give the guys a book, as the princess did, and the guys give the girls a rose, as the knight did. Give me a book over a rose any day, but to give a book to anyone is a precious gift.
Anyways, I decided to revisit some of my favourite literary quotes about romance to celebrate. As my current read is a Harry Hole novel where the murderer is a man stalking women and using mechanical teeth to tear their throats open so they bleed to death and also drinks their blood…maybe I could use a few sweet words.
So here is my gift to you, quotes chosen by a usually cynical being:
“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (whose birthday is also today!)
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you directly without problems or pride”
“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth,”You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.”
Daniel Ladinsky (often misattributed to Hafez), Unknown
“But we loved with a love that was more than love.”
Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee
“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I’ve never been so strong,
Now I’m where I belong.”
Maya Angelou, Where We Belong, A Duet
“We fucked a flame into being.”
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Inside a Mind 
Leave a comment