Цитаты из книги All About Love

Bradshaw [in "Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth"] believes that ending patriarchy is one step in the direction of love.

Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape. Hence, the romance novel remains the only domain in which women speak of love with any degree of authority. However, when men appropriate the romance genre their work is far more rewarded than is the writing of women.

Contemplating death has always been a subject that leads me back to love

Men theorize about love, but women are more often love's practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.

...whenever a single woman over forty brings up the topic of love, again and again, the assumption, rooted in sexist thinking, is that she is "desperate" for a man. No one thinks she is simply passionately intellectually interested in the subject matter. No one thinks she is rigorously engaged in a philosophical undertaking wherein she is endeavoring to understand the metaphysical meaning of love in everyday life. No, she is just seen as on the road to "fatal attraction."

I was often overwhelmed by grief so profound it seemed as though an immense sea of pain was washing my heart and soul away

All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning-clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love's absence that let me know how much love mattered.

...the journey toward self-actualization and spiritual growth is an arduous one, full of challenges. Usually it is downright difficult. Many of us believe our difficulties will end when we find a soul mate. Love does not lead to an end to difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.

Our cultural passion for the angelic expresses our longing to be in paradise, to return on earth to a time of connectedness and goodwill, to a time when we were heart-whole. <...> Our turning toward the angelic is evocative of our yearning to embrace spiritual growth. It reveals our collective desire to return to love.

Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

I feel our nation's turning away from love so intensely as I felt love's abandonment in my girlhood.