Unrequited love is a deeply emotional experience that many people face at some point in their lives. It can bring moments of heartache, reflection, and even growth. To help you navigate these complex feelings, we’ve gathered a curated collection of the top 39 unrequited love quotes that capture the bittersweet nature of loving someone who may never feel the same way. Whether you’re seeking comfort, understanding, or simply a way to put your emotions into words, these quotes offer a poignant reminder that you’re not alone.
1. “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
2. “In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine, connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least – for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women – my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!” - Emily Brontë
3. “No." Magnus strode toward him. "I didn't call you because I'm tired of you only wanting me around when you need something. I'm tired of watching you be in love with someone else-someone, incidentally, who will never love you back. Not the way I do.” - Cassandra Clare
4. “Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?” - James Patterson
5. “Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.” - Alice Hoffman
6. “...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.” - Elle Newmark
7. “I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is, even at the worst time of all, when I had no hope of ever calling her mine.” - Elizabeth Gaskell
8. “Its been six weeks," he murmured. "Six weeks I've wanted you. I know how you move, and how the sunlight makes a shadow on the curve of your cheek, and the shape of your ear." He chucked harshly then turned his head on the pillow to look at her. "I'm dying," he said. He dropped his fist against his chest. "Right here, you're killing me.” - Laura Kinsale
9. “His hands are saying that he wants to hold her. His feet are saying that he wants to chase after her... He's probably forgotten that I'm here, beside him” - Ai Yazawa
10. “He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.” - Elizabeth Gaskell
11. “I was trying to make you jealous!" Simon screamed, right back. His hands were fisted at his sides. "You're so stupid, Clary. You're so stupid, can't you see anything?"She stared at him in bewilderment. What on earth did he mean? "Trying to make me jealous? Why would you try to do that?"She saw immediately that this was the worst thing she could have asked him."Because," he said, so bitterly that it shocked her, "I've been in love with you for ten years, so I thought it seemed like the time to find out whether you felt the same about me. Which, I guess you don't.” - Cassandra Clare
12. “But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13. “At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now !I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
14. “...Usually i’d sit back and just enjoy the view for what it was because it’s not often you come across something so ridiculously out of place, a girl like you, on the subway, it’s like spotting a unicorn at the zoo.I reasoned how to pull this off, to get you, to say hi, to ask your name, what your voice sounded like, if you had a cute smile because i like cute smiles. In ten minutes I had a thousand thoughts of you and you had no clue...” - Stephan K. Garcia
15. “I imagine there must be only a very, very few men in the world, that I should like to marry; and of those few, it is ten to one I may never be acquainted with one; or if I should, it is twenty to one he may not happen to be single, or to take a fancy to me.” - Anne Brontë
16. “Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.” - Criss Jami
17. “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
18. “Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back . . . then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else.” - Sarah Cross
19. “Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.” - Clark Zlotchew
20. “You loved me-then what right had you to leave me? What right-answer me-for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart- you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine."~Heathcliff” - Emily Brontë
21. “I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.” - Francesca Lia Block
22. “Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.” - William Shakespeare
23. “When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.” - Clark Zlotchew
24. “He doesn't even like me.I let the thought roll around in my head. Anything I feel during that time gets shoved into the vault with the ten-foot-think door slamming as soon as it goes in, just in case something in there has any intention of crawling out.” - Susan Ee
25. “It was like this sometimes, and I felt I should look away, but I couldn't. I wanted to be there, having my face touched, defeating a heart like Peter's, but the next best thing was seeing it for Tiger Lily.” - Jodi Lynn Anderson
26. “Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.” - Carol Rifka Brunt
27. “The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.” - Beth Kephart
28. “I watched you try on suits in Hugo Boss.‘For the big job,’ you said. And I laughed, because I knew I would never see it. I’d never get up and watch you put it on and walk out of the door. I would never be the one that you came home to.” - Kate Chisman
29. “There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one's sentiments.” - Georgette Heyer
30. “With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.” - Sarah Waters
31. “And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.” - Andre Aciman
32. “One sided-love always goes with the urge of possessing.” - Yu-Rang Han
33. “Cruelty is a language that the blind can see, the deaf can hear, and the heart feels forever.” - Shannon L. Alder
34. “Eternity has a way of letting us all grow up.” - Shannon L. Alder
35. “Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.” - Lan Samantha Chang
36. “It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air. I was saying something that was making her laugh, and I couldn't stop looking at her. It was a little bit chilly, and her cheeks were pink, and her dark hair was flowing around her face. All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that. Sometimes our arms brushed against each other as we walked, and it was like I could feel the touch for minutes after it happened.” - Carolyn Parkhurst
37. “Sometimes you grow to love the shadow that follows.” - Donna Lynn Hope
38. “I never hated you. My anger was never with you, but with the little hell my heart had put me in. The anger always passed. I never regretted loving you. If I had gone to my grave never kissing you or touching you, I still would not have thought it a wasted love.” - Madeline Hunter
39. “The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.” - Shannon L. Alder
