Instead of pouring your heart into words, you can recite deeply personal, most memorable quotes about being in love — or rather, unrequited love quotes. RELATED: 50 Crush Quotes About Catching Feelings For Someone New Despite what some may say, unrequited love is real love. Though it may not be reciprocated, your feelings are valid and the love that you’re feeling is real. Unrequited love is so much better than not being able to fall in love. Being in love is truly the light and loveliness of the world. Whether you love someone who doesn’t love you back or you are loved by someone you don’t love back, these relatable unrequited love quotes will put your feelings into words.
31 Best Unrequited Love Quotes
1. “There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one’s sentiments.” ― Georgette Heyer, “Venetia”
2. “I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.” ― Francesca Lia Block, “Dangerous Angels”
3. “The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.” ― Thornton Wilder, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”
4. “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, “Jude the Obscur”
5. “Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not, And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot. To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.” ― Lord Byron, final verse of “Love and Death”
6. “To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have — to want and want — how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!” ― Virginia Woolf, “To the Lighthouse”
7. “And then it happens, the most dreaded response in the world, more terse than any word, more withholding than a no, and strictly verboten for someone as in love with language and me as you claim to be. You: K.” ― Caroline Kepnes, “You”
8. “Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.” ― Alice Hoffman, “Practical Magic”
9. “With women who do not love us, as with the ‘dear departed,’ the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.” ― Marcel Proust, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”
10. “The sun’s gone dim, and / The moon’s turned black; / For I loved him, and / He didn’t love back.” ― Dorothy Parker
11. “She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn’t open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not ’til the day he dies. Not even then.” ― Daniel Handler, “The Basic Eight”
12. “I never expected you to love me, I didn’t see any reason that you should. I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn’t afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection.” — W. Somerset Maugham, “The Painted Veil”
13. “Love may have the longest arms, but it can still fall short of an embrace.” ― Megan McCafferty, “Charmed Thirds”
14. “Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery, or that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, / Or hurled the little streets upon the great, / Had they but courage equal to desire?” ― William Butler Yeats, “No Second Troy”
15. “Too many of us are hung up on what we don’t have, can’t have, or won’t ever have. We spend too much energy being down, when we could use that same energy — if not less of it — doing, or at least trying to do, some of the things we really want to do.” ― Terry McMillan, “Disappearing Acts”
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16. “As long as you’re neurotic and crazy, he’s great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.” ― Candace Bushnell, “Sex and the City”
17. “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.” ― Sylvia Plath to a friend, as quoted by Janet Malcolm in “The Silent Woman”
18. “The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.” ― Joyce Carol Oates, “Death Mother”
19. “The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, “Invisible Monsters”
20. “How do you make yourself not like someone?” ― Louise Rennison, “Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging”
21. “Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn’t love you.” ― Tennessee Williams, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
22. “Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?’ ‘Always,’ Carol said, smiling, too.” ― Patricia Highsmith, “The Price of Salt”
23. “Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.” — Cassandra Clare
24. “I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms … on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” ― John Green
25. “There’s something funny about unrequited love — I suppose it’s because we can all identify with it.” — Charles Schulz
26. “The worst feeling is falling for someone and knowing that they won’t be there to catch you.” — Rashida Rowe
27. “Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?” — James Patterson
28. “You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.” — John Green
29. “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
30. “To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” — Federico Garcia Lorca
31. “It’s more like every electron in every atom in the universe paused, breathed in deeply, assessed the situation, and then reversed its course, spinning backward, or the other way, which was the right way all along. And afterward, the universe was exactly the same, but infinitely more right.” — Lydia Netzer
RELATED: The Real Reason You’re Attracted To All The Wrong People Iva-Marie Palmer is the author of the books in the Gabby Garcia’s Ultimate Playbook series and several young adult novels.
