“There is something about love — I will not say defective for the defect lies in ourselves: but something we have mistaken about its nature. For example, the love you now feel for Justine is not a different love for a different object but the same love you feel for Melissa trying to work itself out through the medium of Justine. Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But is is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shopworn and faded before it reaches its true object. For its destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we build the sort of health of the psyche. I do not mean egoism or narcissism.”

Laurence Durrell, Justine, The Alexandria Quartet.

Image: Willy Ronis, La Nuit au Chalet, 1935.

“He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he had made their acquaintance, got on with them, parted, but he had never once loved; it was anything you like, but not love.”

― Anton Chekhov, The Lady With the Dog in “The Essential Tales of Chekhov,” translated by Constance Garnett.

Image: Still from The Lady with the Dog, 1960, directed by Iosif Kheifits.

“Why is it that you Greeks want so much to be loved? You have an overwhelming need for warmth and care. You divide all foreigners into friends and foes – Philellenes and Misellenes, Greek-lovers and Greek-haters. Has it never dawned upon you that most people are neutral and indifferent?”

― Nikos Dimou, “The Glory that was Greece,” Dialogues.

You can read Nikos Dimou’s Dialogues here.

Image: Constantine Manos © Constantine Manos/MAGNUM/AURION.