“Love bestows innocence. It has nothing to forgive. The person loved is not the same as the person seen crossing the street or washing her face. Nor exactly the same as the person living his (or her) own life and experience, for he (or she) cannot remain innocent. Who then is the person loved? A mystery, whose identity is confirmed by nobody except the lover. How well Dostoevsky saw this. Love is solitary even though it joins. The person loved is the being who continues when the person’s own actions and egocentricity have been dissolved. Love recognises a person before the act and the same person after it. It invests this person with a value which is untranslatable into virtue.”
— John Berger, “Between Two Colmars,” in About Looking
“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons–but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean it is a similar experience to the two people involved. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So he must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world–a world intense and strange, complete in himself.”
— Carson McCullers. from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
“[W]hat nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.”
— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
