43 Of The Most Romantic Lines From Literature

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2. “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 
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3. “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 
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4. “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.” 
—Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice 
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5. “You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.” 
—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago 
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7. “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 
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8. “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 
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9. “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 
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10. “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 
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12. “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 
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13. “I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.”
—Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies 
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14. “When you love something it loves you back in whatever way it has to love.” 
—John Knowles, A Separate Peace 
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15. “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 
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17. “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 
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18. “A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing— not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.” 
—Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient 
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19. “Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.” 
—Neil Gaiman, Stardust 
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20. “When the day shall come that we do part,” he said softly, and turned to look at me, “if my last words are not ‘I love you’-ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time.” 
—Diana Gabaldon, Outlander 
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22. “Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.” 
—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Love Song” 
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23. “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, in a letter to Fanny Brawne 
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24. “And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy.” 
—Plato, The Symposium

25. “If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.” 
—Anton Chekhov, The Seagull 
Suggested by RW89

Suggested by sharzdb Cristina Ivan / Flickr: krystynana

27. “I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was threadbare - there were holes at his elbows; the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.” 
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables 
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28. “We loved with a love that was more than love.” 
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee” 
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29. “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you—haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” 
—Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 
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30. “When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.” 
—William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet 
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32. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” 
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 
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33. “Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.” 
—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn 
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34. “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 
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35. “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 
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37. “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 
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38. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.” 
—John Green, The Fault in Our Stars 
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39. “His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning…to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.” 
—Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera 
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41. “I do love nothing in the world so well as you - is not that strange?”
—William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing 
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42. “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat—your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.” 
—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 
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