While saying "I love you" speaks volumes, there are times when you yearn to express your feelings for a loved one—whether a cherished friend, serious crush, or your soul mate—in a way that's more creative, more eloquent, more memorable...in a word: quotable. For those times, there's no better source to turn to than great authors.
To help you find the perfect love quote for your special someone, we've collected some of most tender, most romantic, and most passionate quotes from some of the world's most-loved authors. How many touching, meaningful, and oh so beautiful ways can you say "I love you"? Here are 65:
Lovesick
Longing to be with your lover so much it hurts? These quotes capture the sweet torment of being madly in love.
1. "I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire." -,
2. "The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity." -
3. "One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough." -,
4. "I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed." -,
5. "By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep; nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her." -,
6. "You pierce my soul. I am half agony. Half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever." -,
7. "If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody." -,
8. "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." -,
9. "I love you more than I hate everything else." -,
10. "Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you." -,
Swoon-worthy
Does the mere thought of your lover make your heart beat faster? These quotes reflect the rapture of romance.
11. "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." -,
12. "He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years." -,
13. "Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book." -,
14. "‘Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again. Hell,' I said, 'I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me? Yes. I want to ruin you. Good,' I said, 'That's what I want too.’"-,
15. "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?" -,
16. "I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be." -,
17. "You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought." -,
18. "In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." -,
19. "I love you more than words can wield the matter, Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty." -,
20. "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." -,
21. "For you, a thousand times over." -,
22. "I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul." -,
Warm and Wonderful
Does that special someone lift your spirits and fill your life with sunshine? These quotes express the warmth and wonder of love.
23. "This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles." -,
24. "You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed." -,
25. "Her love was entire as a child’s, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring." -,
26. "All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity." -,
27. "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." -,
28. "When someone loves you it's like having a blanket all round your heart." -,
29. "He understood everything she did not say, which at its core was: Don't let go." -,
30. "I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand." -,
31. "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." -,
32. "Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved." -,
33. "For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home." -
34. "You could have had anything else in the world, and you asked for me." -,
35. "Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?" -,
Destined and Forever Devoted
Do you believe that you and your significant other were meant to be together for eternity? These quotes affirm that sentiment.
36. "We’ve loved each other so long I’ve never been a man and not loved her." -,
37. "My own one, I have never loved anyone in the world but you." -,
38. "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." -,
39. "I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together." -,
40. "It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight." -,
41. "That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together." -
42. "I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life." -,
43. "Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear." -,
44. "I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me." -,
45. "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." -,
46. "What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?" -,
47. "So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you." -,
48. "I love you. I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I've ever had, and no matter what happens to us in the future, every day we are together is the greatest day of my life. I will always be yours." -,
49. "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." -,
50. "Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: I love you." -,
Love Is...
From outstanding authors, these quotes ponder the meaning of love and its incredible power.
51. "Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface." -,
52. "It is better to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all." -,
53. "Love sought is good, but given unsought is better." -,
54. "Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn’t know were there, even the ones they wouldn’t have thought to call beautiful themselves." -,
55. "When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance." -,
56. "People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life." -,
57. "Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all." -,
58. "You know, when it works, love is pretty amazing. It’s not overrated. There’s a reason for all those songs." -,
59. "The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth." -
60. "Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel." -,
61. "Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind." -,
62. "Love is a great beautifier." -,
63. "It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love." -,
64. "You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not." -,
65. "When you make loving others the story of your life, there's never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another." -,
