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4 min read
Quotes about love from incredible writers including Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, Bolu Babalola, Rupi Kaur and more.
Ah love – let us count the ways… With wedding season and a hot [insert noun] summer upon us, we’ve collated some of the most romantic, wistful, inspiring and truthful quotes about love from across our favourite literature and poetry.
With ardent declarations from Jane Austen heroes, wise words from Maya Angelou and Edith Wharton via new writing that conjures up that first flush of love from contemporary writers such as Bolu Babalola, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Sally Rooney, here is love in all its forms.
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Whether you’re falling heads over heels or reflecting on what makes a great love, we’ve got the quotations that truly capture what it means to lose your heart. And – if you’re licking your wounds after a bad break-up – we’ve also got wisdom from Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron and Carrie Fisher to put love into perspective.
Read on and enjoy…
Love In Colour by Bolu Babalola
“She is fascinated by how much romantic love can soften a hard life, highlight the best of you, not condemn the worst of you.”
Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward
“Remember on the right night and
under the right light
any idea can seem like a good one
and love
love is mostly ill advised but always
brave.”
The House At Pooh Corner by AA Milne
“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
Shop The House At Pooh Corner by AA Milne (£8.99, HarperCollins)
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
“You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest.”
Heartstopper (Volume Four) by Alice Oseman
“I love Nick. I love Nick so, so much. But what I’ve realised through all of this is that we need other people too. Siblings. Parents. Friends. More friends. A therapist. Even teachers, sometimes. That doesn’t mean our relationship isn’t strong. If anything… I think we’re stronger now.”
Shop Heartstopper (volume four) by Alice Oseman (£10.99, Hachette)
Daisy Jones And The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
“I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to… I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace.”
Shop Daisy Jones And The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (£8.99, Cornerstone)
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
“I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you’re with them.”
The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller
“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
Shop The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller (£9.99, Bloomsbury)
These Are The Words by Nikita Gill
“Fall in love with someone
who tastes like adventure
but looks like
the calm, beautiful morning
after a terrible storm”
Shop These Are The Words by Nikita Gill (£7.99, Pan Macmillan)
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
“Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt from my long-term friendships with women.”
Shop Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton (£8.99, Penguin)
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
“‘It’s funny about love,’ Sophia said. ‘The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.’
‘That’s very true,’ Grandmother observed. ‘And so what do you do?’
‘You go on loving,’ said Sophia threateningly. ‘You love harder and harder.’”
Milk And Honey by Rupi Kaur
“how you love yourself is
how you teach others
to love you”
Shop Milk And Honey by Rupi Kaur (£9.99, Andrews McMeel Publishing)
A Year Of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman
“Love just enough. What’s enough? Enough to hold. When it hurts, you’re loving too much. Just enough to hold. Anything more than a handful and you’re in trouble.”
Shop A Year Of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman (£9.99, Headline)
The Note by Zoë Folbigg
“But part of Maya is surprised because she could see herself with Train Man, together in a happy future. Not a Hollywood future either. A real one, where hair greys, smiles thin, but lovers still hold hands, despite having seen the worst of each other.”
Anne Of The Island by LM Montgomery
“I’ve loved you ever since that day you broke your slate over my head in school.”
Shop Anne Of The Island by LM Montgomery (£15.45, Simon & Schuster)
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
“I like you very much. Just as you are.”
Shop Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (£8.99, Picador)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.”
Shop Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (£9.99, Vintage)
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
After You by Jojo Moyes
“Our eyes locked. And in that moment everything shifted. I saw what I had really done. I saw that I could be somebody’s center, his reason for staying. I saw that I could be enough.”
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
“Love is many things none of them logical.”
Shop The Princess Bride by William Goldman (£8.99, Bloomsbury)
Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
Shop Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (£8.99, HarperCollins)
The Forty Rules Of Love by Elif Shafak
“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”
Shop The Forty Rules Of Love by Elif Shafak (£8.99, Penguin)
Notes To Self: Essays by Emilie Pine
“It is difficult to translate a great love, a great life, into words on a page. It sounds so prosaic – raking leaves, smiling at each other in understanding – but it is in the everyday moments that the tenacity of love, and its depth, are often revealed.”
A Court Of Mist And Fury by Sarah J Maas
“And I wondered if love was too weak a word for what he felt, what he’d done for me. For what I felt for him.”
Shop A Court Of Mist And Fury by Sarah J Maas (£8.99, Bloomsbury)
The House Of Mirth by Edith Wharton
“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.”
The Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
“They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort.”
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
“The people you loved, they were always there with you, she had learned.”
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
“The journey into love was so effortless and graceful; the journey out such a long and labored climb”
A Room With A View by EM Forster
“It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
“…love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.”
Shop If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (£8.99, Penguin)
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
“Love is homesickness.”
Shop I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron (£9.99, Transworld)
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
“He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
“Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
Shop Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (£9.99, Virago)
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”
Shop My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult (£8.99, Hodder & Stoughton)
Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head by Warsan Shire
“Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself – what you’re wearing, who you’re around, what you’re doing. Recreate and repeat.”
Shop Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head by Warsan Shire (£12.99, Vintage)
Persuasion by Jane Austen
“Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death, I have loved none but you.”
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
“We all know heartbreak. We just have to learn to live with it.”
Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny
“Bread was everything you wanted love to be, but it so often isn’t: hot, sweet, comforting, full of promise, and so heartwarming it made you want to do nice things for other people.”
Shop Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny (£8.99, HarperCollins)
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
“He never fails to amuse her, never fails to be there for her when she wants him, to love her as she wants to be loved, to leave her alone when she needs solitude.”
Shop Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (£8.99, Penguin)
Maya Angelou: The Complete Poetry
“In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours. In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.”
Shop Maya Angelou: The Complete Poetry (£16.98, Little, Brown)
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
“Don’t offer me love
I seek disinterest and denial
Tenderness makes my skin crawl
Understanding is vile
When you offer me happiness
You offer too much
My idea is long-lasting longing
For someone I cannot quite touch”
Shop The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (£9.99, Transworld)
Wisdom by Dorothy Parker
“This I say, and this I know:
Love has seen the last of me.
Love’s a trodden lane to woe,
Love’s a path to misery.”
Shop The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker (£12.99, Penguin)
chasing ceremony/convincing myself by Hollie McNish
“I already said i love you
so many times in life:
each time i said i love you;
each postcard that i sent;
each nightie that you lent me”
Funeral Blues or Stop All The Clocks by WH Auden
“I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
“In vain I have 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.”
Shop Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (£10.99, Union Square)
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
“To live with someone I love and respect, who really loves and respects me – what a difference it has made to my life.”
Shop Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (£8.99, Faber)
Images: courtesy of publishers
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