more about love, fallen

Probably almost none of you know I really enjoy collecting good quotations and selections from literature. The last poem I posted reminded me of some thought-worthy ones:

"God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. . . ."

"Falling in love, we said: I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion; so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. . . ."

"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."

Selections from "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood