When I was just a toddler, left to my own devices from two busy parents and two older siblings, I would often wander to the nearest bookshelf and flip curiously through the colorful pages for hours at time. I absorbed them all, repeatedly, enthusiastically, and without any regard for my boisterously uninterested cohorts. Reading was my first talent. By the time I entered kindergarten I had already taught myself to read, which I can only credit to some powerful intervention of fate.

Reading has come and gone in my life. Most recently, my passion for exploring the world through a different set of eyes has been rekindled. I love the vulnerable, unabashed, complex, intimate honesty of a well written story. These are collected passages on love that shook me.

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle

"In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever... The ego always either wants something, or if it believes there is nothing to get from the other, it is in a state of utter indifference: It doesn't care about you. And so the three predominant states of egoic relationships are: wanting, thwarted wanting (anger, resentment, blaming and complaining) and indifference.

What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever."

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

"Why should I have thought I was anything other than a girl? Because I was attracted to a girl? That happened all the time. It was happening more than ever in 1974. It was becoming a national pastime. My ecstatic intuition about myself was now deeply suppressed. How long I would have managed to keep it down is anybody's guess. But in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born."

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

"Noni had never had love at all. She had never sat in a hushed room and talked about such things as might make your soul tremble, like a candle. She had never launched herself coquettishly at Calcutta parties, sari wrapped tightly over her hips, ice tonkling madly in her lime soda. She has never flown the brief glorious flag of romance, bright red, over her existence, not even an episode of theater, a bit of pretense to raise her above her life. What did she have? Not even terrible hatreds; not even bitterness, grief. Merely irritations over small things..."