We asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us about their favorite romantic lines from literature. Here are some of their responses.
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
Suggested by Vivi Hyacinthe on Facebook
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
Suggested by Alex Zrenner on Facebook
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
Suggested by Giovana Draghi on Facebook
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
Suggested by TXBluebonnet
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
Suggested by Christianna Novakovic on Facebook
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
Suggested by Marlaine23
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
Suggested by eriamasmi
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
Suggested by janal44d6632e0
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
Suggested by mjmcgarry13
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
Suggested by Larissa Trevino
14. "When you love something it loves you back in whatever way it has to love."
—John Knowles, A Separate Peace
Suggested by mollyp49cf70741
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
Suggested by marashaw
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
Suggested by ericag5
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
Suggested by heatherl46fd8569e
19. "Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel."
—Neil Gaiman, Stardust
Suggested by katiea47d3178d6
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
Suggested by Sara Westcott on Facebook
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"
Suggested by Jack Snyder on Facebook
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
Suggested by Erika Ashlee Bakal on Facebook
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
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
Suggested by emilya425ae247c
28. "We loved with a love that was more than love."
—Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee"
Suggested by Shannon Arney on Facebook
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
Suggested by Pam Orr on Facebook
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
Suggested by Molly Moreau on Facebook
32. "I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be."
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Suggested by Megan Rose Scott on Facebook
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
Suggested by Megan Elizabeth on Facebook
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
Suggested by Emily Sposa on Facebook
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
Suggested by gemsowerby
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
Suggested by Gina Clark on Facebook
38. "You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."
—John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Suggested by Reagan Dreiling on Facebook
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
Suggested by Diana Betancourt Ortega on Facebook
41. "I do love nothing in the world so well as you - is not that strange?"
—William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Suggested by Emily Georgina on Facebook
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
Suggested by Gina Clark on Facebook
