When in love, our heart overflows. Whether love is requited or remains a hope and dream, love compels us to express ourselves. This original collection, culled from William Shakespeare’s works, testifies to the essential link between love and language, between the experience of falling in love and the urge to express this unique feeling with our beloved and the world. Shakespeare’s inventiveness and facility with words is such that even brief lines seem to contain whole galaxies of meaning. This allows us to read the brilliant passages gathered in this book without needing the whole context-the way we can marvel at a gem mined from a vast mountain without accounting for all that compressed it into a spark of beauty. Since their first publication more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s lines describe the pangs, pains, and pleasure of love like no other writer before or after him.