Quotes about unrequited-love
Jerry Darroch -
To love and not be loved is to die and not be dead
Olivia Sudjic - Sympathy
I had shelved expectations of another kiss the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well—the proximity and denial.
Elizabeth Chandler - Legacy of Lies & Don't Tell
I had discovered that there was something more painful than falling in love with someone who hasn't fallen for you hurting that person-hurting him and not being able to do anything about it.
Wheston Chancellor Grove -
To love completely is to remember a time and place before the knowledge of losing it only strengthens it. —from Who Has Known Heights: The Mystique Memoirs of a Melancholic Mind
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The Sorrows of Young Werther
Think of you! I do not think of you you are always before my soul.
Kellie Elmore -
Winter is much like unrequited love cold and merciless.
Poppy Z. Brite - The Value of X
There were books about how to be gay he'd seen them in stores and libraries. Some of them even had diagrams. But there weren't any diagrams about how to fall in love with your best friend and not fuck everything up.
Denice Envall -
I fell for you and I fell hard. You bruised my knees and my heart to the point where I will do everything in my power never to fall for anyone again. It’s safer to stay on your feet. I would rather walk through life completely without love - empty than crawl through what’s been pumping through my veins one more time.
John Green - Looking for Alaska
I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.
Cassandra Clare - City of Glass
The way he looked at you. I got it then. He loved you, and it was killing him. He won't get over you, Clary, he can't.
James Patterson - The Angel Experiment
Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?
Cassandra Clare - City of Glass
I wouldn't change it," Simon said. "I wouldn't give up loving you. Not for anything. You know what Raphael told me? That I didn't know how to be a good vampire, that vampires accept that they're dead. But as long as I remember what it was like to love you, I'll always feel like I'm alive.
Carson McCullers - The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a
Sarah Dessen - The Truth About Forever
I have to admit, an unrequited love is so much better than a real one. I mean, it's perfect... As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.
Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear
I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that
Rose Gordon - Her Imperfect Groom
A person doesn't know true hurt and suffering until they've felt the pain of falling in love with someone whose affections lie elsewhere.
Julia Quinn - The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever
She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.
Christine Seifert - The Predicteds
We're cool," I say calmly, although I feel something else. I feel... sad. Like I've lost something I never quite had.
Miranda Kenneally - Catching Jordan
When unrequited love is the most expensive thing on the menu, sometimes you settle for the daily special.
Cassandra Clare -
Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
You loved me-then what right had you to leave me? What right-answer me-for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart- you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine."~Heathcliff
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!O any thing, of nothing first create!O heavy lightness, serious vanity,Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram
nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!
Shannon L. Alder -
Never fall in love with someone that won't fight for you because when the real battles begin they won't pull your heart to safety, but they will their own.
Alma Katsu - The Taker
I’d always secretly believed that a love as fierce and true as mine would be rewarded in the end, and now I was being forced to accept the bitter truth.
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine, connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least – for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary fac
Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear
When you love something, you have to make sure it loves you back, or you'll bring about no end of trouble chasing it.
Julio Alexi Genao - When You Were Pixels
I loved you even when you forgot me.And—for a little while—you loved me back.
Ann Brashares - Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
Out of her favour, where I am in love.
Cesare Pavese - Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
So Hee Park -
You know, unrequited love is very difficut? It's not just having this one-sided love of someone who's far away. Being close, talking daily, liking a guy who's constantly near me is harder than it would be under different circumstances.
Kiran Joshi -
The biggest curse in life is not loosing your love, but not being loved by someone you love.
Sherry Thomas - Tempting the Bride
I’ve always loved you,” he said, his eyes a blue that was almost violet. “You know this.” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I only wonder whether I deserve such devotion.”“Sometimes people fall in love with those who do not return the same strength of feelings. It is as it is,” he said with a quiet intensity. “What I give, I give freely. You owe me nothing, not love, not friendship, not even obligation.
Wendy Higgins - Sweet Evil
Besides, unrequited love is one of those things that all teen-agers have to go through, right?
William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.
Cathleen Schine - The Love Letter
All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.
Karen Tayleur - Love Notes From Vinegar House
Which is when I decided I would never love anyone again because you just felt like an idiot when you put love out there and it didn't come back your way.
Madeline Hunter - The Romantic
I never hated you. My anger was never with you, but with the little hell my heart had put me in. The anger always passed. I never regretted loving you. If I had gone to my grave never kissing you or touching you, I still would not have thought it a wasted love.
Barbara Pym - Excellent Women
I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.
André Aciman -
If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225)
Sarah J. Maas - Throne of Glass
In the garden, the Captain of the Guard stared up at the young woman's balcony, watching as she waltzed alone, lost in her dreams. But he knew her thoughts weren't of him.
Eric Gamalinda - My Sad Republic
Let her remain where she is. A constellation away.
Françoise Sagan - dans un an
She said she didn't love him, and he said it didn't matter, and the poverty of their words brought tears to their eyes.
Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
And so she shuddered away from the threat of his enduring love. What did he mean? Had she not the power to daunt him? She would see. It was more daring than became a man to threaten her.
W. Somerset Maugham - The Painted Veil
She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
Gregory Maguire - The Next Queen of Heaven
But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.
Daniel Handler - The Basic Eight
She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not ‘til the day he dies. Not even then.
Donald Miller - Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.
André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name
And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.
Kristan Higgins -
Granted, I'd waited a long time to hear those words. Would've sold a kidney-maybe two-to have heard them at one point. Now, though...they didn't have the same impact. They were, in fact, an overcooked noodle in the pasta salad of love.
Chimnese Davids - My Unrequited Love Letters
I've pushed your love away and I've run from you, sometimes I've checked out, but this is the reason. I just couldn't understand what we have. I mean we have never met in real life, yet we've loved each other for over 3 years.
Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.
Joan Bauer - Thwonk
It was February sixth: eight days until Valentine's Day. I was dateless, as usual, deep in the vice grip of unrequited love. It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids in their windows by January second to rub it in.
N.K. Jemisin - The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The priest's lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal's doom. My grandmother's lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.
Lady Augusta Gregory - Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and the Fianna of Ireland
And my desire,' he said, 'is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.
Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.
Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise
Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.
Joan Bauer - Thwonk
Mom put dense cheddar bread into a bag for a man who said this was his wife's favorite - he'd driven all the way from New Jersey to buy it because today was their anniversary. Several women in the store jabbed their husbands on hearing this. I hung my head - Peter Terris wouldn't cross the street to buy me a Twinkie.
Graeme Simsion - The Rosie Project
I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had eno
Charlotte Brontë - Villette
Graham’s thoughts of me were not entirely those of a frozen indifference, after all. I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the skylights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly s
Donna Lynn Hope -
Sometimes you grow to love the shadow that follows.
Anna Akhmatova - The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,Though you are the sister of the river willows,I will kill you with my singing,Without spilling your blood on the ground.Not touching you with my hand,Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,But with your unimaginable groansI will finally slake my thirst.From her, who wandered the earth before me,Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,From her, who still exists in the ether—From her you will set me free.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - White Nights
At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now !I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.
Jeanette Winterson - The World and Other Places: Stories
Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.
John Corey Whaley - Highly Illogical Behavior
And, long after Clark had gone home, Solomon stayed up wondering if everyone falls in love with someone who can't love them back.
Shuu Maiko (Nisekoi) -
I've decided to take this unrequited love, and quietly put it away in a corner of my heart as a bittersweet page of my youth.
Rainbow Rowell - Carry On
What do you want from me, Snow?""Nothing," he says. And he means it, the actual bastard.
Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch
I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.But I wouldn’t say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.
Alex Ankarr - Wolf Runaway
Ree is his. Is his, is devoted to him, is aggravatingly tender and possessively passionate and wrapped up in him in a thousand ways, loves him in a way that is very useful. It seems a law of nature, at this point. Even if the events of this startling evening have served to give him pause, a little. But Ree is still his. He's fairly sure. Such complex knots can't be untied so quickly, can they?Still, it's not the only thing disturbing him, about the Dam's account of early events. She laughs when
Naomi Alderman - Disobedience
It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.
Justin Wetch - Bending The Universe
Time machine to the pastStep back a few yearsOld feelings, like LazarusSuddenly reappear.It's your song on the radioAnd it's your hand in mineAs this wave crashes over meOur stars again come unaligned.
R. Y.S. Perez - I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
I wanted to say "don't leave me," but I'm so tired of begging people to stay.
R. Y.S. Perez - I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
...the hardest word to swallow is almost.
Garth Risk Hallberg - City on Fire
You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.
Heenashree Khandelwal - By Chance
Some are convicted for breaking the heart…some are the victims of broken heart – Irony of unrequited love.
Charlotte Brontë - Villette
Your dress is thin, you have been dancing, you are heated." "Always preaching," retorted she; "always coddling and admonishing." The answer Dr. John would have given did not come; that his heart was hurt became evident in his eye; darkened, and saddened, and pained, he turned a little aside, but was patient.
Kristan Higgins - All I Ever Wanted
I had to get over [him]. For months now, a stone had been sitting on my heart. I'd shed a lot of tears over [him], lost a lot of sleep, eaten a lot of cake batter. Somehow, I had to move on. [Life] would be hell if I didn't shake loose from the grip he had on my heart. I most definitely didn't want to keep feeling this way, alone in a love affair meant for two. Even if he'd felt like The One. Even if I'd always thought we'd end up together. Even if he still had a choke chain on my heart.
David S.E. Zapanta - Posthumous
To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing.
Olivia Sudjic - Sympathy
She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.
Charlotte Deanna Harper -
I've dreamt of us falling in love and being together in a million different ways, yet I still wake up in the one way without you.
Ivan Turgenev - Diary of a Superfluous Man
Sentimental outbreaks are like liquorice; when first you suck it, it's not bad, but afterwards it leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.
BinYamin Gulzar -
I thought that you could hear all my unspoken words.....for I misunderstood the language of my own love was so intense and your ears were so brittle!
Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Princess
I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk down that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for either of yours. I perhaps that when you told me you did not love me my feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than
Gabriel García Márquez - Memories of My Melancholy Whores
I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love.
Stefanie Sta. Maria -
unrequited love is the most selfless love.
Glenn Haybittle - The Memory Tree
At that moment the ghost dance seems to Zinnia like the relationship of two people who never quite consummate the love they feel for each other.
Julie Berry - All the Truth That's in Me
My head is full of seeing you see me.
Sachin Kundalkar - Cobalt Blue
That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here.
Glenn Haybittle - The Memory Tree
Every night I build a fire for you, Alowa. Every night I dance on the rooftop for you. Look at the flames, Alowa. Aren’t they beautiful? Look at the smoke. I’m dancing in the smoke, Alowa.
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too
Lydia Larue - Undercover Desire
If I could undo everything," Tony said, "I would never have gone to that party. I was an idiot, Kelly, and it cost me the love of my life.
William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
Make me a willow cabin at your gateAnd call upon my soul within the house;Write loyal cantons of contemned loveAnd sing them loud even in the dead of night;Hallo your name to the reverberate hillsAnd make the babbling gossip of the airCry out "Olivia!" O, you should not restBetween the elements of air and earthBut you should pity me
David Levithan - The Realm of Possibility
It is a horrible wonderful thing to be in love with you. To get to hear you sing for hour after hour but never be the subject of the song. To listen and listen and listen.
Jeanne Safer - The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found
The world shrinks to include only two people, only one of whom -- the beloved -- has power. This inequitable distribution naturally breeds resentment and feelings of hopelessness that the dependent person dare not express for fear of alienating the necessary person even more.
Jeanne Safer - The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found
Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome -- especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because they sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which no one wants to be cured.
Iris Murdoch - The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.
David Levithan - The Realm of Possibility
She is the weakness you think of as strength while I am the strength you have no idea is there.