The real sin ma'am, in my mind lies in thinking of ever wedding with a man you don't love honest and true.

For the error bred in the bone of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have, not universal love but to be loved alone.

Any lustful fool can love a million women, but only a real man can love one woman cloned a million times.

"The desire forcontinuity of being-loved-alone seems to me "the error bred in the bone" of man. For "there is no one-and-only, as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, "there are just one-and-only moments."

Yes,' muttered Jon, 'life's beastly short. One wants to life forever and know everything.'
'And love everybody?'
'No,' cried Jon; 'I only want to love once - you.

To love makes one solitary.

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?

Tis long since I beheld that eye
Which gave me bliss or misery;
And I have striven, but in vain,
Never to think of it again:
For though I fly from Albion,
I still can only love but one.

As some lone bird, without a mate,
My weary heart is desolate;
I look around, and cannot trace
One friendly smile or welcome face,
And ev'n in crowds am still alone,
Because I cannot love but one.

And I will cross the whitening foam,
And I will seek a foreign home;
Till I forget a false fair face,
I ne'er shall find a resting-place;
My own dark thoughts I cannot shun,
But ever love, and love but one.

People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.

The truth of the matter is that — by an exorbitant paradox — I never stop believing that I am loved. I hallucinate what I desire. Each wound proceeds less from a doubt than from a betrayal: for only the one who loves can betray, only the one who believes himself loved can be jealous: that the other, episodically, should fail in his being, which is to love me — that is the origin of all my woes. A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want?

"Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice,hope, a treacherous illusion".

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination

But was it love? Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?