Love Hurts

  "There is no safe investment.

   To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.

   If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your  heart to no one, not even an animal.

   Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

   But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless  -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

   The alternative to the risk of tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell."

                                      -- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves