Best of All Times Unrequited n Quotes

Carson Mccullers

“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.”

Kristan Higgins

“I had to get over [him]. For months now, a stone had been sitting on my heart. I’d shed a lot of tears over [him], lost a lot of sleep, eaten a lot of cake batter. Somehow, I had to move on. [Life] would be hell if I didn’t shake loose from the grip he had on my heart. I most definitely didn’t want to keep feeling this way, alone in a love affair meant for two. Even if he’d felt like The One. Even if I’d always thought we’d end up together. Even if he still had a choke chain on my heart.”

Patrick Rothfuss

“I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn’t entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool.”

Louisa May Alcott

“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.”

T H White

“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.”

Rose Gordon

“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.”

Abraham Cowley

“A mighty pain to love it is,
And ‘t is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.”

André Aciman

“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.”

Julia Quinn

“She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.”

André Aciman

“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)”

Margaret Mitchell

“If I said I was madly in love with you you’d know I was lying.”

Tonya Hurley

“Being in love with someone who doesn’t even know you exist isn’t the worst thing in the world. In fact, it’s quite the oppostie. Almost like passing in a term paper that you know sucked, but having that period of time where you haven’t gotten your grade back yet — that kind of exhale where you haven’t been rejected, although you pretty much know how it’s going to turn out.”

Louis C K

“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.”

Sanober Khan

“the saddest thing is to be
a minute to someone,
when you’ve made them your eternity.”

Melissa Jensen

“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.”

Christine Seifert

“We’re cool,” I say calmly, although I feel something else. I feel… sad. Like I’ve lost something I never quite had.”

Carol Rifka Brunt

“Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.”

Cassandra Clare

“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.”

Elizabeth Chandler

“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.”

Margaret Mitchell

“Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.”

Miranda Kenneally

“When unrequited love is the most expensive thing on the menu, sometimes you settle for the daily special.”

Georgette Heyer

“There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one’s sentiments.”

Cassandra Clare

“Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.”

André Aciman

“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento – when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”

Emily Brontë

“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”

William Shakespeare

“Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.”

Laura Kinsale

“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.”

Patricia Highsmith

“Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?’

‘Always,’ Carol said, smiling, too.”

Francesca Lia Block

“I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.”

Elizabeth Gaskell

“He shrank from hearing Margaret’s very name mentioned; he, while he blamed her – while he was jealous of her – while he renounced her – he loved her sorely, in spite of himself.”

Denice Envall

“I miss you in waves and tonight I’m drowning. You left me fending for my life and it feels like you’re the only one who can bring me back to the shore alive.”

Thornton Wilder

“The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.”

Gabriel García Márquez

“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.”

Cassandra Clare

“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.”

Rosamund Lupton

“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…”

Elizabeth Gaskell

“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.” 

Laini Taylor

“There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.”

GG Renee Hill

“She loved him. But he didn’t know how to love.
He could talk about love. He could see love and feel love. But he couldn’t give love.
He could make love. But he couldn’t make promises.
She had desperately wanted his promises.
She wanted his heart, knew she couldn’t have it so she took what she could get.
Temporary bliss. Passionate highs and lows. Withdrawal and manipulation.
He only stayed long enough to take what he needed and keep moving.
If he stopped moving, he would self-destruct.
If he stopped wandering, he would have to face himself.
He chose to stay in the dark where he couldn’t see.
If he exposed himself and the sun came out, he’d see his shadow.
He was deathly afraid of his shadow.
She saw his shadow, loved it, understood it. Saw potential in it.
She thought her love would change him.
He pushed and he pulled, tested boundaries, thinking she would never leave.
He knew he was hurting her, but didn’t know how to share anything but pain.
He was only comfortable in chaos. Claiming souls before they could claim him.
Her love, her body, she had given to him and he’d taken with such feigned sincerity, absorbing every drop of her.
His dark heart concealed.
She’d let him enter her spirit and stroke her soul where everything is love and sensation and surrender.
Wide open, exposed to deception.
It had never occurred to her that this desire was not love.
It was blinding the way she wanted him.
She couldn’t see what was really happening, only what she wanted to happen.
She suspected that he would always seek to minimize the risk of being split open, his secrets revealed.
He valued his soul’s privacy far more than he valued the intimacy of sincere connection so he kept his distance at any and all costs.
Intimacy would lead to his undoing—in his mind, an irrational and indulgent mistake.
When she discovered his indiscretions, she threw love in his face and beat him with it.
Somewhere deep down, in her labyrinth, her intricacy, the darkest part of her soul, she relished the mayhem.
She felt a sense of privilege for having such passion in her life.
He stirred her core.
The place she dared not enter.
The place she could not stir for herself.
But something wasn’t right.
His eyes were cold and dark.
His energy, unaffected.
He laughed at her and her antics, told her she was a mess.
Frantic, she looked for love hiding in his eyes, in his face, in his stance, and she found nothing but disdain.
And her heart stopped.”

Gregory David Roberts

“nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.”

Patrick Rothfuss

“When you love something, you have to make sure it loves you back, or you’ll bring about no end of trouble chasing it.”

Cassandra Clare

“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.”

Criss Jami

“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.”

Alma Katsu

“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.”

Thomas Hardy

“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!”

Tasha Alexander

“It’s delicious to have people adore you, but it’s exhausting, too. Particularly when your own feelings don’t match theirs.”

Alice Hoffman

“Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.”

Perry Moore

“I caught myself thinking about falling in love with someone who I hoped was out there right now thinking about the possibility of me, but I quickly banished the notion. It was that kind of thinking that landed me in this situation to begin with. Hope can ruin you.”

Cora Carmack

“I get what it’s like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you don’t.”

Cesare Pavese

“Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.”

Alessandra Torre

“The heart is stubborn. It holds onto love despite what sense and emotion tells it. And it is often, in the battle of those three, the most brilliant of all.”

Ann Brashares

“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.”

Park So Hee

“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.”

Bohumil Hrabal

“He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax…”