Vilena

“What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“What I have called Appreciative love is no basic element in Affection. It usually needs absence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom only Affection binds us. We take them for granted: and this taking for granted, which is an outrage in erotic love, is here right and proper up to a point. It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling. Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves: A captivating journey through the different forms of love

“By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”
― T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture

“Love, hatred, you have only to choose; they all sleep under the same roof; you can double your existence, caress with one hand and strike with the other.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses