Love and romance - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

A man's way with women is in inverse ratio to his prowess among men. The weakling and the saphead have often great ability to charm the fair sex, while the fighting man who can face a thousand real dangers unafraid, sits hiding in the shadows like some frightened child.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)

You love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

''Love? What is that?'' ''It's tomorrow and yesterday. It's hoping and happiness and pain, the complete self because it's selfless, the chain that binds you to life and makes living it worth while.''

- Leigh Brackett, ''The Vanishing Venusians'' (1945)

Love can make man a beast. Love can beautify ugliness.

- Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast (film, 1946), translated by Francis Howard (1946)

The Klantheid was not built to dislike, or indeed to do anything but love. Love was the deep-rooted instinct of its nature, the inner strength and meaning of its existence. Deeply, passionately, it longed to love, not merely the man and the woman, but all things, all humans, all life forms, all planets, all suns, all universes, all time and space.

- Gordon R. Dickson, ''The Three'' (1953)

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world.We simply have hobbies.

- Gore Vidal, Visit to a Small Planet (TV play, 1955)

The new worlds were austere, carefully planned, sterile in their perfections. Something had been lost in the dead reaches of space, and only Earth knew love.

- Robert Sheckley, ''Love, Incorporated'' (1956)

Leading psychologists say that real love is a fortifier and a restorer of sanity, a balm for damaged egos, a restorer of hormone balance, and an improver of the complexion.

- Robert Sheckley, ''Love, Incorporated'' (1956)

What is ''love''? [. . .] I'll give an exact definition. ''Love'' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Love is not, as some poets say, a raging brush fire, but a hearthfire, which burns hotly, it is true, but in order to warm the cold sea-caves of the heart and light its pools with anemones of radiance.

- Thomas Burnett Swann, Day of the Minotaur (1966)

Love and joy are incredibly habitforming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.

- John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

''A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,'' Tomiko said, ''and interpret it as Love.''

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''Vaster Than Empires and More Slow'' (1971)

In this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972)

Divine love is at worst an illusion, at best a dream for some imaginary future time. Human love is here and now.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Children's Crusade'' (1974)

I will go into the world and find my way, I will not die by my own hand, I will regret no act of love. [. . .] Any manner of love is good if there's kindness in it.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Night Wind'' (1974)

''Did you love him? Was he your lover?'' [. . .] ''There's not exactly the same thing, but, yes to both.''

- Tom Reamy, ''San Diego Lightfoot Sue'' (1975)

When love cannot possess, it is content to serve.

- Spider Robinson, ''Soul Search'' (1979)

Hate is an attracting force, just like love.

- Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic (1983)

He never saw Molly again.

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

Lovewas always a word that covered too much territory, from loving a spouse to loving a hobby or abstract justice, and the emotion-mongers of popular entertainment portrayed it as everlasting and exclusive. In a culture under stress the truth could not be concealed by sentimental fluff. The Greenhouse people learned to appreciate love without glorifying it.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

Among all men - those who value beauty, money, success, prestige - those of us who value love are the most dangerous of all. More than any others, we will compromise morals, ethics, our lives, and the lives of those around us - all for the sake of love.

- Tara K. Harper, Grayheart (1996)

Love isn't something that one throws off like an old hat. Love clings to the soul like cockleburs to the hair.

- Richard A. Bamberg, ''Love's Last Farewell'' (1998)

Falling in love is like inscribing a map on one's vision. There's just the map, and everything that isn't on it is meaningless.

- L. Timmel Duchamp, ''Dance at the Edge'' (1998)

That was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything - that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it - and its choice to be there - are gone.

- Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane (1999)

Just as men and women sometimes lie when they say they love and will return, so they sometimes lie also when they believe they will not.

- Tanith Lee, ''Rapunzel'' (2000)

Love isn't a cage, or if it is, a pretty one, with the door undone, and the birds out and sitting on the roof.

- Tanith Lee, ''Rapunzel'' (2000)

If I love no one I am free. So long as I love no one, I can travel where I wish. I can become anyone I wish.

- Joyce Carol Oates, ''You, Little Match Girl'' (2000)

She had hated being so transparent, hated that everyone could see. Love had snuck into her heart and lightened it, made it clear, easy to see through.

- Nalo Hopkinson, ''Under Glass'' (2001)