Unrequited Love Quotes

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.

~ Jeanne Safer

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

~ Iris Murdoch

She is the weakness you think of as strength while I am the strength you have no idea is there.

~ David Levithan

You think I need an orgasm to enjoy sex?” she demanded. “What are you, like fifteen?” She eyed him in disgust. “I can get my own orgasms just fine. Last night was not about me getting off. It was about comfort and solace. About helping you to forget for a while.”Ethan blinked as the full magnitude of her words pelted him like shrapnel. “Oh my God. It was a pity fuck?

~ Amy Andrews

What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?

~ Eleanor Catton

No god will spare you forgiveness for loving me.

~ Liam Levi

All that existed was the blinding imperative to not think, to leave it all behind. To have it all fade to black in the throes of a truly good orgasm. To thrust and rock and pound until he came long and hard. To reach the pinnacle as fast as he could, to leap off the edge and truly leave all his earth-bound worries behind.He was a cave man. He was a Neanderthal. He was fucking Cro-Magnon.

~ Amy Andrews

Not a day or an hour and sometimes not even a moment in advance did I have any idea what Patrick had in mind for me, or whether he had me in mind at all. This uncertainty lay like a sore under the surface of my skin, erupting again and again, then subsiding, but never healing.

~ Jan Ellison

What, Kilorn?' I sigh. 'What,' he echoes, shaking his head. After a long second, something snaps in him. 'I know you don't feel the same way I do. About us.' I'm seized by the urge to smash my head against a rock. Us. It feels stupid to talk about, a foolish waste of time and energy. But more than that, it's embarrassing and uncomfortable. My cheeks flame red. This is not a conversation I ever wanted to have with him.

~ Victoria Aveyard

JJ glared at his slumbering frame. Long legs, lethal in denim, his button fly already enticingly popped, abdomen all ridged and naked, begging for a finger or a tongue to discover the hills and valleys, dark shaggy hair spread around his head like a freaking halo on her pillow. Well too damn bad for this broken-down angel. She was the one who’d worked her ass off until two am. Not him. And she wanted her bed back.

~ Amy Andrews

Think of you! I do not think of you, you are always before my soul.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first [met you]. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since,—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

~ Charles Dickens

I’ve had many crushes before, but none so deep as this. Your scent’s the only thing I crave; you’re the only one I miss.

~ Veronica Nagorny

Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?''That's the very thing I say to myself,' said Gabriel.

~ Thomas Hardy

I'm not unlucky at love, just incredibly lucky with celibacy.

~ Tim Heaton

Some people are like an open grave:You give it the thing you love mostAnd then get nothing in return.

~ Abu Al-Ala Al-Ma'arri

HERMIAGod speed fair Helena! whither away?HELENACall you me fair? that fair again unsay.Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!Your eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue's sweet airMore tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.Sickness is catching: O, were favour so,Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go;My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody.Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,The rest I'd give to be to you translated.O, teach me how you look, and with what artYou sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.HERMIAI frown upon him, yet he loves me still.HELENAO that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill!HERMIAI give him curses, yet he gives me love.HELENAO that my prayers could such affection move!HERMIAThe more I hate, the more he follows me.HELENAThe more I love, the more he hateth me.HERMIAHis folly, Helena, is no fault of mine.HELENANone, but your beauty: would that fault were mine!

~ William Shakespeare

Oh yes, it's very tragic. Why does everyone always like love stories? What about absence-of-love stories? Aren't they much more common?

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Why weren't we born in the same era? he lamented. She eased past him neither here nor there, looked over her shoulder and whispered, How mundane and cliche would that be?

~ Donna Lynn Hope

...and yes even loved him even though logic and reason told me I had no business feeling that way about him but I didn't care, no I loved him, and wanted him to know it not because I expected him to reciprocate )and yes even loved him even though logic and reason told me I had no business feeling that way about him but I didn't care, no I(even though I really really wanted him to) but because if someone ever loved me in that pure way I would want to know about it

~ Megan Mccafferty

At the ponds that evening I said to Antonio: It's always been like that, since we were little: everyone thinks she's bad and I'm good.He kissed me, murmuring ironically, Why, isn't that true?That response touched me and kept me from telling him that we had to part. It was a decision that seemed to me urgent, the affection wasn't love, I loved Nino, I knew I would love him forever. I had a gentle speech prepared for Antonio, I wanted to say to him: It's been wonderful, you helped me a lot at a time when I was sad, but now school is starting and this year is going to be difficult, I have new subjects, I'll have to study a lot; I'm sorry but we have to stop. I felt it was necessary and every afternoon I went to our meeting at the ponds with my little speech ready. But he was so affectionate, so passionate, that my courage failed and I put it off.

~ Elena Ferrante

The Offing - And if the sky itself, no matter its hue, were to fracture... What then? Would I then know freedom's name?In my wake lies the shore—a past where I had been happy—refusing to yield to the tide. Before me, upon the horizon, is the sun... hesitant... inert... A new day cannot rise if its ancestor does not fall. Am I but a pawn in this game? I cannot command the sun to set, nor will the moon to take its place and wash the shore away. That power belongs to kings.To drown in the offing. Such sovereign beauty. Such exquisite pain.

~ Rj Arkhipov

Jemima Jane Erickson was one drunken pass away from jumping Ethan Weston's bones. He just didn't know it.

~ Amy Andrews

Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.

~ Louise Glück

Which is worse? Loving someone and not being able to be with them or not loving someone and having to be with them.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

The Hardest thing about being broken, isn't the Love you don't receive, It's the Love you long to give that nobody wants..

~ Dinesh Kumar Biran

And she never knew that he laid awake the whole time, his lips at her temple, his hand against her hair.Whispering her name.Whispering other words as well.

~ Julia Quinn

Time didn’t heal my heal wounds but it lent me perspective. My vision was no longer clouded and I saw what I’d become. I’d let inspiration become obsession. Tunnel vision had hindered all progress. I was so fixated on you, I got stuck.

~ Ashley Sarel

I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.

~ Djuna Barnes

Act that way and slowly but surely I will fade away. All the dawns and all the twilights will rob me, piece by piece, of myself, and before long my very life will be shaved away completely - and I would end up nothing.

~ Haruki Murakami

Did you hear about Katie Parkinson? ... She's going out with Christopher... They've been kissing.It was like a Semtex explosion in my brain. I did not know whether to cry or run away.

~ Will Once

Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who's had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he's available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom

~ Michael Cunningham

There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: Up to here there was no love; from here on there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take a moment, a month, or a year to come on, and in each two its gradations are different. With some it comes fast, with some it comes slowly. Sometimes one kindles from the other, sometimes both kindle spontaneously. And once in a tragic while one kindles only after the other has already dimmed and gone out, and has to burn forlornly alone.(Too Nice A Day To Die)

~ Cornell Woolrich

For a moment, Blake said nothing. After chewing on her venom for a moment, he shrugged. “I would rather you hate me for who I am than love me for who I’m not.

~ Tanya Kaley

There’s nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love. I think it’s shitty, just plain shitty. To love someone who doesn’t return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it’s unbearably boring. I’ll tell you what’s exciting: sweaty, passionate nights. But sitting on the veranda outside the home of a sleeping woman who isn’t dreaming about you is slow moving and just plain sad.

~ Steve Toltz

I just stood there, like a grain of sand amongst amillion others on a beach.

~ Jeff Erno

The truth is that there is almost nothing as tiresome as unwanted love.

~ Sheila Kohler

She personified her name in everything she did. Even when we would row, her words were deftly chosen and spoken rather like an intricate dance. And I so loved to dance with her.

~ Lauren Cagliola Green

That thing that Hamlet says - there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Not quite true if you are stuck under a grand piano, not quite true for genocide, but surely it must be true about love?

~ Deborah Meyler

I can't give you the moon,” the tinker said. “She doesn't belong to me. She belongs only to herself.

~ Patrick Rothfuss