1. "You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language."
2. "Things and animals- and our enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable."
3."For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first."
4. "When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are."
5. 
6. "It is also good to love: Because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward- beating heart, they must learn to love."
7. "But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is-; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves."
8. "Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you."
9. You don't need to watch the whole thing. The first 2 mins are enough.
10. "We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far."
11. "Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent-?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances."
12. "But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: and what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many other who still wanted to come."
13. "By about 4 AM he had decided he was in love with me. Which, though a little strange, since I’d barely spoken, was fine with me. It’s always nice when someone’s in love with you. Gives you leverage."
14.
15. "It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that-), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way-."
16. "You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don't think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss."
17. "Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?"
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Works Cited.
1. Rilke, Rainer. Letters to a Young Poet. New York: Random House Inc., 1984. Print. (34).
2. Rilke, Rainer. (39).
3. Lightman, Alan. Einstein's Dreams. New York: Warner Bros. Edition, 1993. Print.
4. Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Dir. John Madden. 2001. Film.
5. Poehling, Allison. allie-poehlingx3.xanga. Dec 11, 2010. Web. 04/25/2011.
6. Rilke, Rainer. (68).
7. Rilke, Rainer. (69).
8. Rilke, Rainer. (41).
9. Akon. Universal Records: SRC Records, Inc.,2005. Film.
10. Rilke, Rainer. (87).
11. Rilke, Rainer. (69-70).
12. Rilke, Rainer. (70-71).
13. Poehling, Allison.
14. Nicholas. Otherwise source unknown.
15. Rilke, Rainer. (72).
16. Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie's World. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1991. Print.
17. Lightman, Alan.
Wow! I really love this mashup. Love seems so simple at first glance, it is just a feeling but I think Viky shows that it is much deeper than that. I wasn't expecting some of the connections she made especially to polar opposites such as loneliness. What I loved about this blog was that it literally encompassed so many differnt angles of the concept of love, some that I had never even known were there.
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