The pangs of unrequited love have been a source of inspiration for writers, poets, and thinkers throughout the ages. This complex emotion—yearning for affection that remains unreturned—can be both painful and poignant, capturing the raw essence of the human experience. In this collection, we delve into 78 compelling quotes that beautifully encapsulate the ache and longing associated with unreciprocated love. Each quote offers a glimpse into the heartache and resilience of those who have loved deeply without expectation, serving as a reminder of the bittersweet nature of love itself. Whether you're seeking solace in shared experience or simply looking to reflect on the complexities of the heart, these quotes provide a comforting and thought-provoking journey through the uncharted waters of one-sided love.
1. “If music be the food of love, play on;Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,The appetite may sicken, and so die.That strain again! it had a dying fall:O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,That breathes upon a bank of violets,Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,That, notwithstanding thy capacityReceiveth as the sea, nought enters there,Of what validity and pitch soe'er,But falls into abatement and low price,Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancyThat it alone is high fantastical.” - William Shakespeare
2. “First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.” - Carson McCullers
3. “Snape's patronus was a doe,' said Harry, 'the same as my mother's because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from when they were children.” - J.K. Rowling
4. “There were books about how to be gay; he'd seen them in stores and libraries. Some of them even had diagrams. But there weren't any diagrams about how to fall in love with your best friend and not fuck everything up.” - Poppy Z. Brite
5. “Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.” - Patrick O'Brian
6. “Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?” - James Patterson
7. “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
8. “Mom put dense cheddar bread into a bag for a man who said this was his wife's favorite - he'd driven all the way from New Jersey to buy it because today was their anniversary. Several women in the store jabbed their husbands on hearing this. I hung my head - Peter Terris wouldn't cross the street to buy me a Twinkie.” - Joan Bauer
9. “If I said I was madly in love with you you'd know I was lying.” - Margaret Mitchell
10. “Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.” - Alice Hoffman
11. “A mighty pain to love it is,And 't is a pain that pain to miss;But of all pains, the greatest painIt is to love, but love in vain.” - Abraham Cowley
12. “...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
13. “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
14. “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
15. “I had discovered that there was something more painful than falling in love with someone who hasn't fallen for you; hurting that person-hurting him and not being able to do anything about it.” - Elizabeth Chandler
16. “Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.” - Margaret Mitchell
17. “Rats! There goes the bell... oh, how I hate lunch hours! I always have to eat alone because nobody likes me... Peanut butter again... I wish that little red haired girl would come over, and sit with me. Wouldn’t it be great if she’d walk over here, and say, “May I eat lunch with you, Charlie Brown?” I’d give anything to talk with her... she’d never like me, though... I’m so blah and so stupid... she’d never like me... I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to talk to her! Everyone would probably laugh... she’d probably be insulted someone as blah as I am tried to talk to her. I hate lunch hour... all it does is make me lonely... during class it doesn’t matter... I can’t even eat... Nothing tastes good... Rats! Nobody is ever going to like me... Lunch hour is the loneliest hour of the day!” - Charles M. Schulz
18. “When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...” - Rosamund Lupton
19. “I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.” - Barbara Pym
20. “I shall never love any as I love thee, Moonbrow!” she cried.He nuzzled her, very gently. “Nor I you, Ryhenna,” he said. “Tek is my mate. I love her. You are my shoulder-friend, and I love you. I love you both, but differently. And when in a year or two years’ time, you dance court within this glade, it will be with one whom you love in a way entirely other than the way that you love me. I am your companion, your friend, Ryhenna, just as you are always and ever mine. Stand fast with me,” he said, “and no foe shall ever part us.” - Meredith Ann Pierce
21. “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
22. “sometimes no matter how many eyelashes or dandelion seeds you blow, no matter how much of your heart you tear out and slap on your sleeve, it just ain't gonna happen.” - Melissa Jensen
23. “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
24. “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
25. “Why should you think that I should woo in scorn?Scorn and derision never come in tears:Look, when I vow, I weep; and vows so born, In their nativity all truth appears.How can these things in me seem scorn to you,Bearing the badge of faith, to prove them true?” - William Shakespeare
26. “...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
27. “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
28. “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
29. “He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax...” - Bohumil Hrabal
30. “Unrequited love is the infinite curse of a lonely heart.” - Christina Westover
31. “Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.” - Cassandra Clare
32. “A person doesn't know true hurt and suffering until they've felt the pain of falling in love with someone whose affections lie elsewhere.” - Rose Gordon
33. “It's delicious to have people adore you, but it's exhausting, too. Particularly when your own feelings don't match theirs.” - Tasha Alexander
34. “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
35. “You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!” - Thomas Hardy
36. “You know, unrequited love is very difficut? It's not just having this one-sided love of someone who's far away. Being close, talking daily, liking a guy who's constantly near me is harder than it would be under different circumstances.” - Park So Hee
37. “But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.” - Gregory Maguire
38. “Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,Though you are the sister of the river willows,I will kill you with my singing,Without spilling your blood on the ground.Not touching you with my hand,Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,But with your unimaginable groansI will finally slake my thirst.From her, who wandered the earth before me,Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,From her, who still exists in the ether—From her you will set me free.” - Anna Akhmatova
39. “Out of her favour, where I am in love.” - William Shakespeare
40. “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
41. “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
42. “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
43. “We're cool," I say calmly, although I feel something else. I feel... sad. Like I've lost something I never quite had.” - Christine Seifert
44. “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
45. “I’d always secretly believed that a love as fierce and true as mine would be rewarded in the end, and now I was being forced to accept the bitter truth.” - Alma Katsu
46. “Besides, unrequited love is one of those things that all teen-agers have to go through, right?” - Wendy Higgins
47. “Soul connections are not often found and are worth every bit of fight left in you to keep.” - Shannon Alder
48. “Love?' he asked himself, giving no sense of recognition for that word in the dictionary of his mind. It was the only battle he had lost in life, the only thing that had been snatched away from him, before he could even claim it.” - Faraaz Kazi
49. “The pain would not leave him. It came to him like the tide that hits the sea.” - Faraaz Kazi
50. “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
51. “You wanted a wife but I wasstill a girl.” - Kate Chisman
52. “In the morning, that moment, when I knew it was you. When I could feel you breathing and we opened our eyes at the exact same time.” - Kate Chisman
53. “Girls spilled drinks down their dresses and flicked their hair. Wishing anyone, maybe even you, would notice them... You were someone to me.” - Kate Chisman
54. “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
55. “And my desire,' he said, 'is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.” - Augusta Gregory
56. “I’ve always loved you,” he said, his eyes a blue that was almost violet. “You know this.” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I only wonder whether I deserve such devotion.”“Sometimes people fall in love with those who do not return the same strength of feelings. It is as it is,” he said with a quiet intensity. “What I give, I give freely. You owe me nothing, not love, not friendship, not even obligation.” - Sherry Thomas
57. “There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one's sentiments.” - Georgette Heyer
58. “There is no such thing as unrequited love; the phrase ought to be stricken from the lexicon. Love is a thing shared, an intertwining of essential separateness into something not quite alone. There is nothing like it under the heavens. Like bread, it will not be made with flour or water alone; the recipe requires both. Guarding each other’s vulnerability provides the yeast that makes it rise, and salt from the tears that caring brings lends the finishing touch.” - Andrew Levkoff
59. “All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.” - Cathleen Schine
60. “I've pushed your love away and I've run from you, sometimes I've checked out, but this is the reason. I just couldn't understand what we have. I mean we have never met in real life, yet we've loved each other for over 3 years.” - Chimnese Davids
61. “For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.” - Jean Rhys
62. “Shut up…let me tell you, LET ME. Every time I look at your face or even remember it, it wrecks me. And the way you are with me and you’re just fun and you shit all over me and you make fun of me and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough...I don’t even think about women anymore. I think about you.” - Louis C.K.
63. “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
64. “Let’s always love each other, and never be in love with each other.” - David Levithan
65. “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)” - Andre Aciman
66. “Certainly no one has ever died of an unrequited passion—it's usually the ones that are requited that get people in trouble.” - Mercedes Lackey
67. “Winter is much like unrequited love; cold and merciless.” - Kellie Elmore
68. “Cruelty is a language that the blind can see, the deaf can hear, and the heart feels forever.” - Shannon L. Alder
69. “Eternity has a way of letting us all grow up.” - Shannon L. Alder
70. “Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.” - Lan Samantha Chang
71. “...I'm the last person to ask about unrequited love - I've run away to the Moon and fled to its valleys...” - John Geddes
72. “...what is the meaning of La Belle Dame Sans Merci? - have you never been enthralled? enchantment that is unrequited desolates the soul...” - John Geddes
73. “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
74. “I don’t believe in ghosts and neither should you, Kingsley.””Why not? I’ve been in love with a ghost for thirty years.” Kingsley strolled over to the armchair and sat on the ottoman between the other man’s knees. Soren narrowed his eyes at him. “The body’s not even cold yet. Eleanor’s been gone one day and you’re already trying to get me into bed again?” ”Again?” Kingsley laughed and rolled his eyes. “Always. Are you surprised?” Soren shrugged. “Not really.” - Tiffany Reisz
75. “My heart is sair-I dare na tell,My heart is sair for Somebody.” - Robert Burns
76. “The moment he laid eyes on Kuga, I knew. There's a reason I'm doing this to him. I want to see it; how he's fallen in love with a guy, and how he makes him his own. And then what I've done will become a sharp knife, thrown right back at me.That's right. I just wanted to see.And the meaning behind the sharp knife flying towards me: Why not me? Why can't it be me? All this time, I would be lying if I said I've never wished for it, but by being merely an observer, I've somehow managed to distance myself.Kuga is a bright light, like the sun. I, on the other hand... (Yashiro)” - Kou Yoneda
77. “Tell me, if you thought a man had a tendresse for you, but he wasn't doing anything about it. And you wanted to hurry him up a little so you made a move, an unmistakable move; one that nobody could pretend had been a misunderstanding. And he - he ignored it - ignored you. What would you feel?” - Ahdaf Soueif
78. “Hunting hawks did not belong in cages, no matter how much a man coveted their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They were far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.” - Lois McMaster Bujold
