Love Quotes Quote by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”

“A haunting memory flooded over Ethan when his own little sister had died. He had not thought of her in years! He glanced at the other chairs that sat empty around the table and wondered how different, or better his life would have been if she had lived. He tried to imagine her sitting there, but had trouble conjuring up her face.”

“If you love someone but rarely make yourself available to him or her, that is not true love.”

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”

““She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.”