aeris

“And God said “Love Your Enemy,” and I obeyed him and loved myself.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Broken Wings

“She'd laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Kiss me again,” he says, drunk and foolish. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King