Love! That enigmatic feeling that's so immense and yet so difficult to put your finger on. In the end, we want to read something that doesn't explain love per se (that would be impossible) but to resonate with us. To make us feel less alone in these huge feelings, and perhaps, to guide us through it.
Love frees you from the laws of nature, Kahlil Gibran
“Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that the laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature cannot alter its course.”
In this lyrical novel, Broken Wings, about a tragic love-at-first-sight, Gibran encourages us to see love not as a prison we often lament it to be, but as a window through which our spirit soars.
Love and marriage are separate, Ahlam Mosteghanemi
“Nobody gives the flower the option to whither on a branch or in a vase. Spinsterhood is a relative issue. A woman can marry and have children but still feel like a spinster deep down… like a flower shedding its petals under the roof of married life”
This is a small excerpt from Algerian Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Black Suits You So Well (2012), about an Algerian teacher who must express her womanhood in spite of the predominance of terrorism in her country in the 1990s.
Love as a conscious process, Ghada Al Samman
“I didn’t fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way.” --Ghada Al Samman in her poetry book I Declare Love Upon You (1976).
We regret when we sacrifice too little and not too much, Mona Al Marshoud
“Sometimes, we find ourselves willingly sacrificing things for the ones we dearly love, and the ones who truly deserve our sacrifice… And how many times we felt regret, because we were very stingy with that sacrifice?” -- Mona Al Marshoud in You are mine.
Love tears down your defenses, Naguib Mahfouz
Mahfouz probably gives the most brutal explanation of love in this gripping line from Love Above the Pyramid Plateau (1984):
“I knew love for the first time in my life. It is like death, you hear about it now and then but you never really know it until it shows up like an immense force! It devours its prey, renders it defenseless, sends its mind and logic into oblivion, and pours madness inside its core. It is the eternal suffering and eternal happiness.”
We all strive to make life 'semi-sweet', Mohammed Sadek
This line offers a somber, practical but still "sweet" view on love:
“True love is the kind of love that makes people strive every day and every second to reach a point where life can become 'semi sweet', simply because life will never be fully sweet. But it can get sweeter in the company of someone who appreciates your existence in this world.” --Mohammed Sadek in Hepta (2014)