We asked our community of passionate writers to tell us their favorite romance lines from literature. If your favorite quote is missing, or this post fails to spark genuine emotion in you, take it up with the community! We, however, stand by our following of romantics and think they did a bang up job. Light a few candles, crack open that box of wine and have the tissues ready. In no particular order, here are 61 of our favorite romance quotes from literature:
1.
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.
- A.A. Milne, Pooh's Little Instruction Book
2.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
- Shakespeare, Sonnet 130
3.
I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.
- John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
4.
What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
- George Eliot, Adam Bede
5.
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
6.
Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I’d really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world.
- Haruki Murakami, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning
7.
"I am desolate without you, my darling, O, so desolate! I do not mind having to work: but if you will send me one little line, and say, ‘I am coming soon,’ I will bide on, Angel—O, so cheerfully!" "The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I don’t like to see the rooks and starlings in the field, because I grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me. I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own dear! Come to me—come to me, and save me from what threatens me!"
- Thomas Hardy, Tess of d'Ubervilles
8.
I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen.
- Charles Bukowski, An Almost Made Up Poem
9.
I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm.
- William Goldman, The Princess Bride
10.
He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
- E. M. Forster, A Room With A View
11.
It's like time has lost all continuity. Every second with you outweighs days of life before I met you.
- Stephanie Meyer, The Chemist
12.
"And when it did happen, how did you feel?" "Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental -- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very very nice car crash that never ends."
- Douglas Copeland, Microserfs
13.
We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
- Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
14.
Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
- Patrick Rothfus, Name of the Wind
15.
Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself.
- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
16.
He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
- Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
17.
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No ... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is!
- Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin
18.
There is no pretending. I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there's life after that, I'll love you then.
- Cassandra Clare, The Mortal Instruments
19.
To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
- Anne Sexton, Admonitions to a Special Person
20.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
- Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
21.
By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep; nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her.
- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady
22.
He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize that he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that a man had been called.
- Neil Gaiman, Stardust
23.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
- Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet XVII
24.
Be careful,
You are not in wonderland
I have heard the strange madness long growing in your soul.
But you are fortunate.
In your ignorance
In your isolation,
you who have suffered
Find where love hides.
Give. Share. Lose.
Lest we die unbloomed.
- Allen Ginsberg
25.
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.
- Jane Austen, Emma
26.
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it
- E. E. Cummings
27.
There are darknesses in life, and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.
- Bram Stoker, Dracula
28.
I wish I knew how to quit you.
- Annie Proulax, Brokeback Mountain
29.
I took a photo of us mid-embrace. When I am old and alone, I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful.
- Joe Dunthorne, Submarine
30.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
- Pablo Neruda, Love Poem XIV
31.
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
- Maya Angelou
32.
Dear forgiveness, I saved a plate for you. Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
- Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Have Been Crossed Out
33.
If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
- Nicole Krause, The History of Love
34.
You have been the last dream of my soul.
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
35.
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
36.
I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
37.
…but language is like rhythms we beat out on kettles for bears to dance to, when what we want is to make music that will wring tears from the stars.
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
38.
Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time.
- Jack Kerouac, On The Road
39.
Isn't it pretty to think so.
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
40.
I looked around the empty room - which was no longer empty. There was a voice in it, and a tall slim lovely woman. There was a dark hair in the pillow in the bedroom. The air was full of music.
- Raymond Chandler, Playback
41.
Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
42.
Though lovers be lost love shall not.
-Dylan Thomas, And Death Shall Have No Dominion
43.
Love is dope, not chicken soup.
- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
44.
I'll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.
- Scarlett O'Hara, Gone with the Wind
45.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.
- Jane Austen, Persuasion
46.
Love is a hawk with velvet claws
Love is a rock with heart and veins;
Love is a lion with satin jaws,
Love is a storm with silken reins.
- Kurt Vonnegut, EPICAC
47.
She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
- J. D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
48.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.
- Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
49.
Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it. 'I love love,' she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that.
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
50.
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
- Michael Cunningham, The Hours
51.
Do I love you? My god, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.
- William Goldman, The Princess Bride
52.
Like all lovers, they spoke much about themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.
- John Williams, Stoner
53.
Who, being loved, is poor?
- Oscar Wild, A Woman of No Importance
54.
I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world as me.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
55.
But that I know love is begun by time;
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
- Shakespeare, Hamlet
56.
You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
57.
If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.
58.
He reached for her and he saw her smile and the voices melded into a single word from God: Home.
- Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
59.
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.
- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
60.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
- Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee
61.
The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
