Heartbreak is a universal experience that resonates with people from all walks of life. Whether it's the end of a romantic relationship, a deep friendship, or an unfulfilled dream, the pain of a broken heart can be overwhelming. Yet, in the midst of this emotional turmoil, there exists a shared comfort in knowing that others have walked the same path. Words have the power to heal, to offer solace, and to remind us that we are not alone. In this carefully curated collection, we bring you 60 poignant quotes about heartbreak, each offering a unique perspective on loss, healing, and the journey towards finding hope again. Let these words serve as a gentle companion, guiding you through the complex emotions of heartbreak and illuminating the path towards healing.
1. “EbbI know what my heart is likeSince your love died:It is like a hollow ledgeHolding a little poolLeft there by the tide,A little tepid pool,Drying inward from the edge.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay
2. “Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.” - Charlotte Brontë
3. “In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.Feel for yourself.” - Jeanette Winterson
4. “Time Does Not Bring ReliefTime does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,—so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, “There is no memory of him here!” And so stand stricken, so remembering him.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay
5. “I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know if your happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh you'll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again?” - Nick Hornby
6. “I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.” - Gabrielle Zevin
7. “I don't think anyone can give you advice when you've got a broken heart.” - Britney Spears
8. “They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.” - Gabrielle Zevin
9. “Did I really want to stay on this road longer, knowing it was only going to end in devastation?” - Becca Fitzpatrick
10. “I wouldn't have been sent back to help you," Tristan continued. "I wouldn't have been made an angel if it weren't important that you live, Ivy. I want you to be mine" -Ivy could hear the pain in his voice- "but you're not.""I am!" she cried out loud."We're on different sides of a river," he said, "and it's a river that neither of us can cross. You were meant for somebody else.” - Elizabeth Chandler
11. “When the guy kissed her, Cassidy felt a stab of pain that was close to physical, and therefore within the penumbra of hurts he told himself he could bear.” - John L. Parker Jr.
12. “Everyones greatest fantasy is to walk away from the life (they think)you lead” - Pete Wentz
13. “Eleanor went to her room "where she was free to think and be wretched.” - Jane Austen
14. “The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.” - John Green
15. “You can obsess and obsess over how things ended—what you did wrong or could have done differently—but there's not much of a point. It's not like it'll change anything. So really, why worry?” - Jess Rothenberg
16. “I'm tired of being your best friend. I'm tired of being second best. I won't settle for that anymore. It's all or nothing, Schuyler. You have to decide. Him or me.- Oliver Hazzard-Perry” - Melissa de la Cruz
17. “Either give me your hand, or end it now, and put us both out of our misery” - Judith McNaught
18. “But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.” - Siegfried Sassoon
19. “Alex chuckled and whispered in her ear. “I’m feeling huge . . . I mean I have this huge desire . . . Crap, you feel good tonight. And you smell so good.” - Ƹ̵Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ♥✫Melisa M. Hamling♥✫Ƹ̵Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ
20. “Did the destruction of one dream leave a vacuum that required filling with another? Is a broken heart more vulnerable?” - Cinda Williams Chima
21. “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
22. “George stared at the dove. What would she say if she could speak to him? What would she wish for, for her father? For she, too, had been harmed by a man who had meant to show his utmost love for her.It made George wonder why love was suppose to be such a wonderful thing. As far as he could tell, love was just another excuse for causing pain.” - Mette Ivie Harrison
23. “When you leave,weary of me,without a word I shall gently let you go.” - Kim Sowol
24. “One of the most difficult things he'd ever done was turn away and leave her standing in the shadows.” - Rachel Gibson
25. “You don't ask nobody to give what they can't give, or be what they can't be. You've learnt that, you got a headstart on heartbreak.” - Jack Farris
26. “There are a million ways to lose someone you love.” - Tammara Webber
27. “In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.” - Kim Edwards
28. “Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!” - Leo Tolstoy
29. “Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.Summers in your absence are as dark as a room.I have closed my arms again. They must do without.To knock at my heart is like knocking at a tomb. Do not write!Do not write. Let us learn to die, as best we may.Did I love you? Ask God. Ask yourself. Do you know?To hear that you love me, when you are far away,Is like hearing from heaven and never to go. Do not write!Do not write. I fear you. I fear to remember,For memory holds the voice I have often heard.To the one who cannot drink, do not show water,The beloved one's picture in the handwritten word. Do not write!Do not write those gentle words that I dare not see,It seems that your voice is spreading them on my heart,Across your smile, on fire, they appear to me,It seems that a kiss is printing them on my heart. Do not write!” - Louis Simpson
30. “How does your patient, doctor?Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest.Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart.Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.” - William Shakespeare
31. “Just tell me you don't love me, and I'll let the matter drop.""What?""What I said. Just say, 'Rai, I don't love you and I never will'. It's that simple.""Raisa, this is getting us nowhere.""Say it!” - Cinda Williams Chima
32. “I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn't exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later.” - Anna Quindlen
33. “All at once it was just too much, and Harvey felt something about to snap. He drew back into the shadowy side of the doorway, out of site. Then he slid down the wall to the ground and put his palm over his mouth to hold in his breath and his feelings both. He'd forced in more air then he could hold, and his lungs were burning. More importantly, his heart hurt... He wished he hadn't eavesdropped.” - Yukako Kabei
34. “think when it's all over it just comes back in flashes, you know? It's like a kaleidoscope of memories; it just all comes back. But he never does. I think part of me knew the second I saw him that this would happen. It's not really anything he said, or anything he did ― it was the feeling that came along with it. Crazy thing is, I don't know if I'm ever going to feel that way again. But I don't know if I should. I knew his world moved too fast and burned too bright, but I just thought, 'How can the devil be pulling you toward someone who looks so much like an angel when he smiles at you?' Maybe he knew that when he saw me. I guess I just lost my balance. I think that the worst part of it all wasn't losing him. It was losing me.” - Taylor Swift
35. “It's only a heartache. It isn't a tragedy. A tragedy would be losing the father of my children to cancer. This I wrestle with the hardest. There are thirty-one flavors of pain, like Baskin Robbins in hell. Am I allowed to feel pain at a breakup? When there is so much other shit going on in this world? Love is extremely serious. I don't think this is trivial.” - Emma Forrest
36. “It's like he has emotional amnesia... I think you have to accept that the person you knew isn't there at the moment. I was witness to how much he loved you. I have the photos. This isn't the person we knew. I don't recognize this person. He's shed his skin." Her heart is broken too. She has to say the thing that will give me back my life. She draws on every reserve. I see how much it hurts her and it hurts me too. I came from her joy and her pain, I lived in it and I live in it now.” - Emma Forrest
37. “It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.” - Susan Sontag
38. “...the heart breaks in so many different ways that when it heals, it will have fault lines ...” - John Geddes
39. “You talked over the tour guide who pointed to houses and windows. Showing us where people had lived and died and other people now stayed in their place. Just like a broken heart." - Adieu” - Kate Chisman
40. “I was a fool. I should have grabbed him when I could have had him all to myself, snatched him up like a ripe mango at the market. But how was I to know that this was what love felt like?” - Jean Kwok
41. “Consider this a one-thousand horsepower divorce, sweetheart” - Daven Anderson
42. “One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.” - Miriam Toews
43. “Isn’t that the greatest tragedy? When someone rejects us, no matter how they abuse our love, we hope against reason that somehow they will come back to us.” - Suzanne E. Anderson
44. “The things that are priceless to my heart carry no currency where we are going.” - Suzanne E. Anderson
45. “For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.” - Catherynne M. Valente
46. “Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.” - Marie-Helene Bertino
47. “She was drawn to damaged souls like a moth to a flame. ” - Anna McPartlin
48. “I had fallen out of my secure world, precipitated beyond the territories I had only begun to control so skillfully. What a foolish step to take. What an insane move to make.” - Francesca Marciano
49. “...and her dreams that didn't happen, that couldn't have happened because she'd pinned them on somebody too broken and unattainable to love her back.” - Janette Rallison
50. “We cannot love a person with an all accepting, transcending and encompassing love without being hurt somewhat, without being disappointed, without being failed of our expectations. We cannot love without being broken, yet we cannot continue in love without being stronger than our brokenness.” - Jocelyn Soriano
51. “It is our wounds that create in us a desire to reach for miracles. The fulfillment of such miracles depends on whether we let our wounds pull us down or lift us up towards our dreams.” - Jocelyn Soriano
52. “How accommodating love is; it forgives everything.” - Isabel Allende
53. “I don't want to know that you don't want me. I don't want to know what you do without me. I don't want to know what I'll be without you. I dont wanna know. I don't wanna know.” - Sara Quin
54. “Love—such a keen mystery prone to pierce and shatter the delicate heart. Yet it possesses more strength, power, and influence than any other magic known to man. ” - Richelle E. Goodrich
55. “For there has never been a story nearly as tragic as the one of Frankenstein, except for that of Johnny Heart and his Francesca Valentine.” - Rae Hachton
56. “We are all Romeos looking for our Juliet, but never finding her.” - Rae Hachton
57. “Because before the time when you're heartbroken, you get to be in love, and that's worth it.” - Leila Sales
58. “Don't tell me how to grieve. Don't tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don't, heartbreak like these doesn't.” - Anthony Doerr
59. “I gave you the best of me.” - Nicholas Sparks
60. “That first time, when he presses his lips against mine and kisses the words ‘I Love You’ right down into the very heart of my soul, that’s when I knew we were about to be ripped apart. -Morgan” - Ƹ̵Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ♥✫Melisa M. Hamling♥✫Ƹ̵Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ
