Now two are becoming one,
the black night is scattered,
the eastern sky grows bright.
At last the great day has come.
Now you have lit a fire and that fire should not go out. The two of you now have a fire that represents love, understanding and a philosophy of life. It will give you heat, food, warmth and happiness. The new fire represents a new beginning – a new life and a new family. The fire should keep burning; you should stay together. You have lit the fire for life, until old age separates you.
— From A Navajo Wedding Ceremony
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth — and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up — that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.
— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Understand, I’ll slip quietly
Away from the noisy crowd
When I see the pale
Stars rising, blooming over the oaks.
I’ll pursue solitary pathways
Through the pale twilit meadows,
With only this one dream:
You come too.
— First Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
Hereafter, I cannot live without you.
Do not live without me.
Let us share the joys.
We are word and meaning, united.
— Hindu marriage ritual
To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation.
It takes a lifetime to learn another person
We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity-in freedom in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
— Gift From The Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
