Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.

These words, said by Ruth to Naomi in Biblical scripture, have so much power they’ve been used in countless weddings and make the heart swell no matter how many times they’re read. Lucky are those who love this deeply. And lucky are we who come across such beauty.

Love’s grip has been poured out in words for centuries, the debilitating yearning, the mutual adulation or undulating agony of unrequited love. Love controls all else. Lovers meet, and life as they know it changes.

I can’t see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death, Henry Miller says in a letter to Anaïs Nin.

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, Catherine says of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea. My love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite, says Shakespeare’s Juliet.

We’ve been strengthened by love and crippled by it. Hearts were made to be broken, said Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned for his love. James Baldwin states it clearly: Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war: Love is a growing up.

But then there is the gloriousness, attributed to Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss: You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.