Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end. – Madame de Stael
This is one of my favorite quotes about the depths of what love, true love means in the world. Love is work. Love brings sacrifice. Love brings pain. Love when it’s real and true lasts forever. When I was in college this quote was a prompt in one of my writing classes. The assignment was to write a short story using this quote as motivation. The story was to be a story of devotion. Our professor gave us one week to write and edit the story to a final draft. I sat up that night with Mr. C and looked up quotes from Madame de Stael, I immersed myself in her writing and the culture that surrounded her. During the turn of the 19th Century, she lived a life of extravagance and expounded on the happenings in her life. As a writer, she spouted off about love, liberty and travel and she didn’t give a crap what anyone else thought. Many of her famous quotes have always appealed to my senses but this one quote from that on was something that I sewed on the mental throw pillow in my subconsicious.
The other day when I ran into my professor at CVS it came back to me and I tossed it on the couch life. It finally applies.
Love is one of the those words I always sorta squirmed about in relationships. People always have something to say about the word. They always have opinions. Timing. Meaning. What it really takes to love someone. Honestly, I don’t know what it takes to love someone. I just know that I do. I know that the past doesn’t matter. That everything before this pails in comparison to what I have right now. And the fear I once had is gone.
Maybe this whole love thing and the quotes swirling around in my heart are just products of how I was taught love should be. I suppose it might be one of those things that only people who have really felt it, will understand. Maybe I’m just expounding like the Madame, but either way this quote sits firmly in my heart and on the Facebook page of the Boyfriend. Sappy? Sure. But it totally applies.