Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. Margaret Atwood
About This Quote

The idea that love can be fleeting, but that it’s still worth experiencing. For people who never fell in love, this quote could be interpreted to mean that it's not possible to fall in love—but that's not quite right. It's certainly possible to fall in love with one person for a time, and then move on, without having ever fallen in love at all. The writer seems to be pointing out the fallacy of thinking that falling in love is permanent or easily repeatable, but that it's still worth experiencing even if your heart doesn't stay broken.

Source: The Handmaids Tale

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