Best 5 quotes of Ebba Haslund on MyQuotes

I must learn to love. And when love is first there, it will soon find an object - a child, a man or a woman. When you're full of love, you'll find a way to release it. Love grows. And when it has grown large and powerful, it will free itself gently from its object and flow out over the world and the people in it - like sunshine, like warmth, like light . . .

It's wrong to be ashamed of yourself. Presumptuous and stupid. I've made myself sick with shame, because I could feel so strongly about another woman. I should instead feel ashamed of the years since then, when I felt nothing. What does it matter who you love? Isn't it the feeling that means something? A child can cry itself sick over a dead bird. And as an adult squeeze out two tears for a dead person. Which sorrow is more genuine? Or more valuable? A shabby office drudge can love his middle-aged wife as passionately as Tristan his Isolde. Is love ridiculous because its object is imperfect and perhaps unaesthetic?

It was more likely the fear of emptiness, of being left alone in a shadow world when everyone else abandoned me, each for his or her own reality, a desperate urge for action, for once in my life to take my fate in my hands. I wanted a place in the real world, wanted something concrete, tangible to cling to - something that was visible to others. I said to myself that I'd had enough of substitutes.

I understand it now. You can't shut anything out. You have to open yourself completely and just receive. Let it get close to you, everything that is, and love it.

I wish I knew more about people, besides the trivial, superficial things - I wish I knew something essential about each and every person. Perhaps others know it, everyone except me. And what's the essential thing in me? Layer after layer of thought and acquired ideas, complexes, memories, inhibitions and, deep inside, a shriveled-up seed that long ago lost its growing power.