Alain De Botton

What does it mean to live happily ever after? At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning. From the first thrill of lust, to the joys and fears of real commitment, to the deep problems that surface slowly over two shared lifetimes, this is the story of a marriage. It is the story of modern relationships and how to survive them. Playful, wise and profoundly moving, The Course of Love is a delightful return to the novel by Alain de Botton, twenty years after his debut Essays in Love.

The Course of Love

amasi

“He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.”

“We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly—and that we are invested enough to care.”

“Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.”

camille leung

Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time

Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another's fragilities and sorrows

Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service.

He is gleefully unconcerned with the true and often dull facts of the universe.

his heart would tighten with grief because a meeting threatened to overrun and get him home an hour too late to put the kids to bed.

How could they possibly be expected, after eighteen or so years of answering to a child's every need, to react enthusiastically to a new and competing source of love?

Pronouncing a lover "perfect" can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them.

The Course of Love quotes

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