30 of the Most Powerful Unrequited Love Quotes from Literature
Unrequited love. While being in love is lovely, it may also leave you feeling a little lonely if that love is not reciprocated. Unrequited love quotes might help us feel less alone when that occurs.
Unrequited love is true love, despite what some people may think. Your feelings are real, and the love you’re feeling is true, even if it doesn’t get returned.
Being unable to fall in love is so much preferable to unrequited love. The world is wonderfully illuminated and beautiful when two people are in love.
Instead of putting your emotions into words, you may recite some of the most moving, unforgettable lines about love, or more specifically, unrequited love quotes. Read on!
1. “Being in love with someone who doesn’t even know you exist isn’t the worst thing in the world. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Almost like passing in a term paper that you know sucked, but having that period of time where you haven’t gotten your grade back yet — that kind of exhale where you haven’t been rejected, although you pretty much know how it’s going to turn out.” ― Tonya Hurley, Ghostgirl
2. “I was in love with an unavailable man, an old, sad story. When I first started to fall for him, months before, my feelings gave me pleasure and hope. I would wait for him, as lovers had waited for each other since the beginning of time. But as the months passed and he didn’t come around, something inside me shifted. My unrequited love became obsessive.” ― Lisa M Philips, Unrequited: The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Romantic Obsession
3. “She’d been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster.” ― Michele Young-Stone, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors
4. “I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage, and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.” ― John Green, Looking for Alaska
5. “If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.” ― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
6. “I wouldn’t change it,” Simon said. “I wouldn’t give up loving you. Not for anything. You know what Raphael told me? That I didn’t know how to be a good vampire, that vampires accept that they’re dead. But as long as I remember what it was like to love you, I’ll always feel like I’m alive.” ― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
7. “Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.” ― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister
8. “I have to admit, an unrequited love is so much better than a real one. I mean, it’s perfect… As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.” ― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
9. “ ’And how do you really feel?’
‘Like I’ll never recover. Like I’ll never draw another breath without half of it being a wish for him.’” ― Jane Seville, Zero at the Bone
10. “I know this sounds crazy to say after one encounter, but I kind of fell for you pretty hard and it has been forever since I’ve connected to anyone like this and my heart is kind of broken in a million pieces. ― BJ Novak, One More Thing
11. “Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?” ― James Patterson, The Angel Experiment
12. “To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! ― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
13. “What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.” ― Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants; The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
14. “ ’You see,’ she concluded miserably, ‘when I can call like that to him across space–I belong to him. He doesn’t love me–he never will–but I belong to him.’” ― L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest
15. “You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It’s an absence–a loss of a heartbeat.” ― Nadège Richards, Burning Bridges
16. “Unrequited love does not die; it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.” ― Ellie Newmark, The Book of Unholy Mischief
17. “Love Jo all your days, if you choose, but don’t let it spoil you, for it’s wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can’t have the one you want.” ― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
18. “Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
19. “Unrequited love is all right in books and things, but in real life, it completely sucks.” ― Meg Cabot, Haunted: A Mediator Tale
20. “But why, she thought wryly, did a man seem more attractive as he became less available? How humbling to think one had so much in common with a cow stretching its neck through a gate for better grass.” ― Mary Jo Putney, The Bargain
21. “How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something.” ― Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You
22. “Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.” ― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
23. “The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.” ― Nuala O’Faolain, My Dream of You
24. “She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.” ― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
25. “I know that’s what people say– you’ll get over it. I’d say it, too. But I know it’s not true. Oh, youll be happy again, never fear. But you won’t forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
26. “I did not know how long it took to get over such a love, and that even when you did, when you loved again, you would always carry a sliver of it in your stitched-together heart.” ― Christina Haag, Come to the Edge
27. “Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)” ― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
28. “…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.
Some people might find that strange.
But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.” ― Ranata Suzuki
29. “I love you. I hate you. I like you. I hate you. I love you. I think you’re stupid. I think you’re a loser. I think you’re wonderful. I want to be with you. I don’t want to be with you. I would never date you. I hate you. I love you…..I think the madness started the moment we met and you shook my hand. Did you have a disease or something?” ― Shannon L. Alder
30. “Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.” ― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister
These relevant unrequited love quotes can help you express your sentiments, whether you love someone who doesn’t love you back or someone loves you, but your affections lie elsewhere.
Though the worse feeling is falling for someone when the feeling isn’t mutual, love felt is love experienced. Which quote resonates with you the most? Share with your friends!
