Mackell Phillips

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves