A Literary Prescription for

Love

For the greatest, oldest, most written-about subject there is, and the finest words for it.

Love is the thing we spend our lives reaching for and rarely find the words for. It comes in a hundred forms, the giddy beginning, the steady middle, the fierce loyalty, the quiet endurance, and literature has been trying to capture all of them for as long as there has been literature. This is a general gathering of the very best: books that understand how love works, and poems that say what the heart cannot. For anyone in love, out of it, or simply in awe of it.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Some of these understand the workings of love, how we bond, how we last, how we love well, and some are novels that show it in full flight, across war, time and the daily effort of staying close. Non-fiction and fiction together, eight of the finest books ever written on the subject.

The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm · 1956

Fromm’s short, profound classic argues that love is not a feeling we fall into but an art we must learn and practise, requiring knowledge, effort and care. Decades on, it remains one of the wisest books ever written on the subject. For anyone who wants to love better rather than simply wait to be loved, it is essential and quietly life-changing.

Attached

Amir Levine & Rachel Heller · 2010

A clear, practical guide to attachment theory, the science of how we bond, and why we love the way we do. Understanding your own patterns, and other people’s, can transform your relationships almost overnight. Accessible and genuinely useful, it is the book to hand anyone puzzled by why love keeps going the way it does for them.

Conversations on Love

Natasha Lunn · 2021

Lunn gathers wisdom on love in all its stages, finding it, keeping it, losing it, from writers, thinkers and her own tender reflections. Wise, warm and quietly moving, it reads like the best conversation you have ever had about the heart. A book to return to at every season of a loving life.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Louis de Bernières · 1994

On a Greek island in wartime, an unlikely, luminous love grows between a doctor’s daughter and an Italian officer. De Bernières writes one of the great modern love stories, tender, funny and heartbreaking, and his famous passage on what love becomes when the first madness fades is worth the whole book. Utterly transporting.

Birdsong

Sebastian Faulks · 1993

Faulks’s unforgettable novel sets a consuming love affair against the horror of the First World War, and asks what tenderness can survive. Sweeping, sensuous and devastating, it is one of the most powerful evocations of love and loss in modern fiction. A book that stays with you for years.

Normal People

Sally Rooney · 2018

Rooney’s spare, piercing novel follows Connell and Marianne over years of drawing together and apart, capturing the aching miscommunications of modern love with uncanny precision. It is a portrait of how two people can be each other’s home and still keep getting it wrong. Contemporary, tender and quietly profound.

A Room with a View

E. M. Forster · 1908

Forster’s sunlit comedy follows Lucy Honeychurch as she chooses, against every convention, the honesty of real love over a respectable match. It is a joyful, gently subversive novel about following your heart. For anyone who needs reminding that love is worth being brave and a little improper for, it is a delight.

The Course of Love

Alain de Botton · 2016

De Botton follows one ordinary couple past the falling-in-love and deep into the real thing: the arguments, the boredom, the daily work of staying. Wise and consoling, it reframes lasting love not as a fairy tale but as a skill. Perhaps the most useful novel about long-term love ever written, and a comfort to anyone in the thick of it.

Poems about love

The finest love poems

from “How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
…I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life.

Perhaps the most beloved love poem in the English language, Barrett Browning’s sonnet measures love against the reach of the whole soul. Written for her husband Robert, it has the rare quality of feeling both grand and utterly sincere. The one to read aloud to someone you love, and mean every word.

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Sonnet 116

William Shakespeare, 1609

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
…Love’s not Time’s fool…
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Shakespeare’s great definition of constant love: the real thing does not waver when circumstances change, but holds steady to the very end. It is the poem read at half the weddings in the world, and for good reason. A ringing, unshakeable statement of what love, at its truest, actually means.

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from “A Red, Red Rose”

Robert Burns, 1794

O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
…And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Burns takes the plainest images, a rose, a melody, the drying of the seas, and makes of them one of the most tender vows ever written. There is nothing clever here, only pure feeling, which is exactly why it has lasted. The love poem to whisper when you want no fine words, only true ones.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about love to keep

We are most alive when we’re in love.

John Updike

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Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Aristotle

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To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

David Viscott

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The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

Audrey Hepburn

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To be truly known and stay is the whole of it. Everything else we call love is only practice for that.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Opening the heart

A gentle practice for softening how you speak to yourself, because learning to love yourself is where loving others begins, and an essay on daring to love again after heartbreak.

Healing Self-Talk: A Self-Love Meditation

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A gentle practice for softening a harsh inner voice into a kinder one, so that love, given and received, has somewhere steady to root.

Listen Now For Free

Open Your Heart After Heartbreak

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On the quiet courage it takes to love again, and how the heart, given time, becomes ready to open once more.

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The Letters I Never Sent

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On the things we most want to say to the people we love, and the quiet importance of finding a way to say them while we can.

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The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice, one day at a time.

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Questions people ask

Reading for Love

Where should I start?

Start with The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, a short, profound classic that treats love not as a feeling that happens to you but as an art you practise. And for a story, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is one of the great modern novels of love found, tested and endured. The poems below are the finest ever written on the subject, and worth reading aloud.

What can I read about love?

Whatever kind of love you are thinking about. Attached explains the science of how we bond, Conversations on Love gathers wisdom on every stage of it, and the novels here, from Birdsong to Normal People, trace love across war, time and the ordinary difficulty of two people trying to stay close. Or begin with the poems and the lines to keep further down the page.

Which quotes and poems about love are the best?

The quotes worth keeping include “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.” (Victor Hugo) and “We are most alive when we’re in love.” (John Updike). For poems, it is hard to better Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Thee?’, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, and Burns’s ‘A Red, Red Rose’, all below in full.

Can reading really deepen how I love?

It genuinely can. Love is the most written-about subject there is, and for good reason: the great books and poems put words to what we struggle to say, and show us love in all its forms, giddy, steady, tested, enduring. Reading them can make you a more attentive, generous and clear-eyed lover of the people in your life. These are the pages to return to when you want to understand the biggest thing there is.

Love

Prescribed reading

The finest love poems

Quotes about love to keep

Opening the heart

Reading for Love

Where should I start?

What can I read about love?

Which quotes and poems about love are the best?

Can reading really deepen how I love?

More prescriptions await.