40 Best Love Quotes Given to Us from Literature

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The best part about reading romance novels is being able to fall in love time and time again. The second best part about reading romances is the ability to have a collection of sweet words that you can keep close to your heart for a bad day, or to help you express your own love. Below are some of the most swoon-worthy love quotes from books. We hope reading them will bring a smile to your face.

1. “My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.” —Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
2. “Who, being loved, is poor?” —Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
3. “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” —Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
4. “Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same . . . If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.” —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
5. “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, Winnie the Pooh
6. “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
7. “But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.” —Pablo Neruda
8. “Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.” —Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
9. “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Bound
10. “So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” —Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
11. “You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.” —Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company
12. “He was my North, my South, my East and West, my working week and my Sunday rest.” —W.H. Auden, Stop All the Clocks
13. “All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.” —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
14. “If I were to live a thousand years, I would belong to you for all of them. If we were to live a thousand lives, I would want to make you mine in each one.” —Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer
15. “For you, a thousand times over.” —Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
16. “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.” —Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra
17. “Doubt thou that the sun is fire, Doubt that that the sun does move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt that I love.” —William Shakespeare, Hamlet
18. “When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” —Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
19. “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.” —Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
20. “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
21. “Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.” —Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries
22. “We love the things we love for what they are.” —Robert Frost, Hyla Brook
23. “Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.” —Neil Gaiman, Stardust
24. “I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty . . . you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.” —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
25. “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.” —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
26. “You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.” —Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
27. “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.” —Jane Austen, Persuasion
28. “I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for their religion—I have shudder’d at it. I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you. [. . .] My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.” —John Keats, A Letter to Fanny Brawne
29. “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” –Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
30. “If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.” —Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
31. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” —Pablo Neruda, Sonnett XVII
32. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” —Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
33. “I have for the first time found what I can truly love—I have found you. You are my sympathy—my better self—my good angel—I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you—and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.” —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
34. “Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
35. “Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch
36. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.” —John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
37. “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same . . .” —Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
38. “I do love nothing in the world so well as you—is not that strange?” —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
39. “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
40. “Always.” —J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Did we capture your favorite love quote? Tell us what your favorite love quotes from books are in the comments below.

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