50 Book Quotes About Love and Romance

It seems there is no topic more broadly expressed and more diverse in books than love. To keep some vibes of that huge heritage here, let me share some favorite love quotes from books with you, supported with tender and romantic illustrations by Pascal Campion, who seems to know how to depict all ins and…

Fiction for adults Quotes

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If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.
(Alfred Tennyson)

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You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
(Dr. Seuss)

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Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
(Neil Gaiman)

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Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
(Robert A. Heinlein)

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“I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.
“Augustus,” I said.
“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “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)

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Who, being loved, is poor?
(Oscar Wilde)

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You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect—you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break—her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.
(Bob Marley)

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He’s not perfect. You aren’t either, and the two of you will never be perfect. But if he can make you laugh at least once, causes you to think twice, and if he admits to being human and making mistakes, hold onto him and give him the most you can. He isn’t going to quote poetry, he’s not thinking about you every moment, but he will give you a part of him that he knows you could break. Don’t hurt him, don’t change him, and don’t expect for more than he can give. Don’t analyze. Smile when he makes you happy, yell when he makes you mad, and miss him when he’s not there. Love hard when there is love to be had. Because perfect guys don’t exist, but there’s always one guy that is perfect for you.
(Bob Marley)

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Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
(William Shakespeare)

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You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.
(Jodi Picoult)

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We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
(Robert Fulghum)

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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
(C.S. Lewis)

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Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

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Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.
(Neil Gaiman)

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Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.
(Oscar Wilde)

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Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
(Plato)

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“How do you spell love?”
“You don’t spell it. You feel it.”
(A. A. Milne)

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Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

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I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
(Charles Dickens)

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You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope…I have loved none but you.
(Jane Austen)

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I ached all over for her; I leaned my head in her beautiful hair. 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)

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There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

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Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar: but never doubt I love.
(William Shakespeare)

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Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

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Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
(Orhan Pamuk)

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The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
(Ernest Hemingway)

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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
(Ursula K. Le Guin)

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Be careful of love. It’ll twist your brain around and leave you thinking up is down and right is wrong.
(Rick Riordan)

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The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
(Oscar Wilde)

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It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
(Agatha Christie)

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Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
(Khalil Gibran)

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…it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
(Leo Tolstoy)

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It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.
(Roald Dahl)

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Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
(Robert Frost)

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Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.
(Nicholas Sparks)

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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)

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I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald)

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What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.
(Victor Hugo)

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Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.
(Charles Dickens)

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Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
(C.S. Lewis)

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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)

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I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
(Margaret Atwood)

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Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have 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 promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
(Shawn Slovo)

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Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn’t breaking. It hurts because it’s getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.
(Rita Mae Brown)

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The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
(Victor Hugo)

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“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
(Jeanette Winterson)

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The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

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To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
(Elizabeth Gilbert)

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If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.
(Haruki Murakami)

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I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
(John Keats)