I tried to recall all the information I knew about love

I tried to recall all the information I knew about love. Unfortunately this information didn’t amount to much. Although more than thirteen years of my life had passed, up to that moment I’d never seen anyone in love. At that time very few books about love or descriptions of the condition of people in love had been printed. Besides, they wouldn’t have let us read any of them.

Iraj Pezeshkzad, tr. D. Davis, My Uncle Napoleon (1973), loc.248

Chirac, like most men who have once found a woman weak, imagined that he understood women profoundly

Chirac, like most men who have once found a woman weak, imagined that he understood women profoundly. He thought of women as the Occidental thinks of the Chinese, as a race apart, mysterious but capable of being infallibly comprehended by the application of a few leading principles of psychology. Moreover he was in earnest; he was hard driven, and he was honest. He continued, respectfully obedient in withdrawing his arm:

A. Bennett, The old wives' tale (1908), 334

I liked Western novels better because of the bitches in them

When I was left home alone, I would put on my mother’s dress and heels and sit on the couch reading Anna Karenina. Society balls, servants, aiguillettes...romantic trysts...I liked everything up to the part when Anna throws herself under the train: What did she do that for? She was beautiful and rich...for love? Not even Tolstoy could convince me...I liked Western novels better because of the bitches in them, the beautiful bitches that men would shoot themselves over and suffer for. Fall at their feet. The last time I cried over unrequited love was when I was seventeen—I spent the whole night in the bathroom with the tap running. My mother consoled me with poems by Pasternak

S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013), 499

In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration

English is the only modern language in which it has been found necessary to borrow from the Latin a word with a depreciatory meaning, the word uxorious, for a man's devoted love for his wife. That love should absorb a man has seemed to them unworthy. In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration; there is a feeling that it was worth while, and the man who has done it feels even a certain pride in the fact; in England he will be thought and will think himself a damned fool. That is why Antony and Cleopatra has always been the least popular of Shakespeare's greater plays. Audiences have felt that it was contemptible to throw away an empire for a woman's sake. Indeed if it were not founded on an accepted legend they would be unanimous in asserting that such a thing was incredible.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 137

He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange

He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange but as something absolute, out of the scope of thought, beyond himself, matter for a confident outward rather than anxious inward looking. He had sought and was satisfied with a few - he thought final - repositories for his emotions: his mother, country, dog, school, a friend or two, now - crowningly - Lois. Of these he asked only that they should be quiet and positive, not impinged upon, not breaking boundaries from their generous allotment. 

E. Bowen, The last September (1929), 41