399 Unrequited Love quotes

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.

Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.

Can’t you just like a girl who likes you back? None of them likes me back. I may as well like the one I really want.

Deep yearning isn’t deep love; it is all the unmet expectations rising to the surface of your soul.

But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, ‘She’s nothing to you’, the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.

You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

I knew I was in love with you. Was I an idiot for thinking you were in love with me too?

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.

...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.

The hardest thing about being broken, isn’t the love you don’t receive, it’s the love you long to give that nobody wants.

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 opposite. 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.

The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.

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

Sometimes you grow to love the shadow that follows.

Problems can be fixed. But unrequited love is a tragedy.

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!

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!

The worst feeling is falling for someone and knowing that they won’t be there to catch you.

I brought you here to tell you this: sometimes what we are searching for does not exist. We may sacrifice for it, even bleed for it, but it was never meant to be ours.

She still loves him. This is the fact she wakes up to each morning. She checks it, sometimes, a tongue probing an aching tooth, making sure it still hurts.

Unfortunately, loving someone doesn’t obligate them to love you back.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

But why, she thought wryly, did a man seem more attractive as he became less available? How humbling to think one had so much in common with a cow stretching its neck through a gate for better grass.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.

The biggest curse in life is not losing your love, but not being loved by someone you love.

If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

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.

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

You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It’s an absence–a loss of a heartbeat.

The person she liked best didn’t like her enough to want more of her, and she didn’t want to pretend that wasn’t awful.

The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.

It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.

I knew you didn’t love me, but I dangerously adored you anyways.

Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.

I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.

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.

A big issue that some empaths face is unrequited love and all the grief that accompanies this experience. If someone truly is your soulmate or twin flame, the relationship will happen sooner or later. … Don’t put your life on hold for another person, no matter how badly you want to be with them. If it’s meant to be, it will be.

I didn’t want to fall in love with you. I knew the risk and understood the consequences. All the warning signs had been in bright blinking neon lights. Telling me to run before I even got near. But our hearts are animals driven by instinct: it only wants and wants and wants. Mine simply wanted you.

Everytime you enter the melancholic tunnel of unrequited love, you will get out of that tunnel with a less cheerful heart but with a more mature mind!

Never fall in love with someone that won’t fight for you because when the real battles begin they won’t pull your heart to safety, but they will their own.

He was both everything I could ever want…And nothing I could ever have…

‘Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?’ ‘Always,’ Carol said, smiling, too.

You can give birth to a beautiful, perfect human being, but requited love isn’t guaranteed for her—or for any of us.

You know, unrequited love is very difficult? 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.

I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year.

‘You see,’ she concluded miserably, ‘when I can call like that to him across space–I belong to him. He doesn’t love me–he never will–but I belong to him.’

I’ve decided to take this unrequited love, and quietly put it away in a corner of my heart as a bittersweet page of my youth.

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.

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.

I know that’s what people say– you’ll get over it. I’d say it, too. But I know it’s not true. Oh, you’ll be happy again, never fear. But you won’t forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.

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

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.

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.

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.

My heart no longer felt as if it belonged to me. It now felt as it had been stolen, torn from my chest by someone who wanted no part of it.

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.

Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.

’And how do you really feel?’ ‘Like I’ll never recover. Like I’ll never draw another breath without half of it being a wish for him.’

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.

I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love.

What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?

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

He doesn’t even like me. I let the thought roll around in my head. Anything I feel during that time gets shoved into the vault with the ten-foot-think door slamming as soon as it goes in, just in case something in there has any intention of crawling out.

She’d been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster.

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.

Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he’s turned it into hate.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn’t love you.

It’s wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can’t have the one you want.

It’s as if I’ve stepped off the edge of a cliff, and even though my heart’s in my mouth and my stomach is in knots, I’m the most excited I’ve ever been in my life. I’m totally enthralled by him. I want him, every part of him, and I desperately want him to feel the same way about me.

Love may have the longest arms, but it can still fall short of an embrace.

I came hoping to see those eyes, but instead I return with my heart, leaving behind only flowers.

You lose yourself trying to hold on to someone who doesn’t care about losing you.

I’ve enough pride never to let myself love a man who does not love me.

Unrequited love differs from mutual love, just like delusion differs from the truth.

My head is full of seeing you see me.

You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.

How timid and frail is unrequited love? A place you entered of your own accord, but you’re trapped inside, unable to find an exit. He doesn’t know a thing, and could one day leave my line of sight, and the love ends passively. A love that does not bloom flowers, and thus cannot dream of bearing fruit. A love like a seed that is forgotten, that is unrequited love.

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

I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back. But I wouldn’t say that. It was rose petals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.

I never hated you. My anger was never with you, but with the little hell my heart had put me in. The anger always passed. I never regretted loving you. If I had gone to my grave never kissing you or touching you, I still would not have thought it a wasted love.

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

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.

You’re hung up on something that’s never going to love you back.

She looks at me and blames me for all of the ways that you don’t love her.

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.

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

Never make someone a priority, when all you are to them is an option.

Which is when I decided I would never love anyone again because you just felt like an idiot when you put love out there and it didn’t come back your way.

It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever.

Trying to get someone interested in us (who is not) is a painful and pointless endeavour. There are many people in the world. Some are for us. Most are not.

She said she didn’t love him, and he said it didn’t matter, and the poverty of their words brought tears to their eyes.

It is our desire, not need, to be loved (back).

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

How do you make yourself not like someone?

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.

Unrequited love was, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed to be capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I see it had advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meagre, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions.

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.

Why do you look so sad? Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.

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

It’s hard to love someone who doesn’t love you back

And yet, because I love thee, I obtain From that same love this vindicating grace, To live on, still in love, and yet in vain

My heart had been touched by him, battered by him, cradled by him as the days passed. He was cruel without meaning to be yet he was kind, and I needed him too much to let myself want him

She saw him first. Twenty years first. Yes, yes: very junior high. But this whole thing feels very junior high. Maybe that’s always how it feels when you are both grown, smart, articulate, mature women. Maybe you always feel like the other person cannot possibly love him, loves instead some fictionalized version of him.

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

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

And, long after Clark had gone home, Solomon stayed up wondering if everyone falls in love with someone who can’t love them back.

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

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.

I gave up hoping…But still, I would think of him, I would cherish his image in my mind, and treasure every word, look, and gesture that my memory could retain.

You can’t get hurt when you love someone from the other side of an estuary. All the years she rejected him, she survived because he was somewhere in the marsh, waiting. But now perhaps he would no longer be there.

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.

And still after all this time, the Sun has never said to the earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with love like that, it lights up the sky.

Somehow I’ve always wanted the ones that didn’t want me. I’m the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

As long as you’re neurotic and crazy, he’s great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.

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.

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.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

The love of you has led me to my salvation, and to what I thought was my peace, once I thought ye dead. …And here you are. …I shall have no peace while ye live, woman. …Mind, I dinna say I regret it.

She’s not into you, Tom. She doesn’t love you. You can’t force someone to love you by doing them favors.

The way he looked at you. I got it then. He loved you, and it was killing him. He won’t get over you, Clary, he can’t.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

you call me to tell me you miss me i turn to face the front door of the house waiting for a knock days later you call to say you need me but still aren’t here the dandelions on the lawn are rolling their eyes in disappointment the grass has declared you yesterday’s news what do i care if you love me or miss me or need me when you aren’t doing anything about it if i’m not the love of your life i’ll be the greatest loss instead

Theo wanted to call him back. But then he thought, oh let him go, there’s no mending a fruitless love, it just has to be endured.

The right people will appreciate you, but the wrong ones never will.

Unrequited love is not an affront to man but raises him.

I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.

Your love was a monster. Every time I would come up for some air It would drown me further deeper, furiously.

If I love you, is that any of your business?

I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give this a chance.

I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand. And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.

I believed my love would be reciprocated because it was pure. But it wasn’t. Reaction to every action? It doesn’t work that way with a human heart. Human mind resembles the quantum world. Always uncertain. Beyond any explanation.

I sometimes think there is nothing more painful than love denied. To love someone you cannot have, to stand beside your heart’s desire and be unable to take them in your arms. A love that cannot be requited. I can think of nothing more painful than that.

I am sleeping with unreciprocated love, while the arms of hope wrap around me.

I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.

I had never wanted to be one of those girls in love with boys who would not have me. Unrequited love plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn’t want, couldn’t use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness. Neither could James. He understood. In such situations, you do one of two things – you either walk away and deny yourself, or you do sneaky things to get what you need. You attend weddings, you go for walks. You say, yes. Yes, you’re my best friend, too.

I hope I’m not turning into that girl, the one who daydreams about a guy she can never have.

Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears. “After all this time?” ” Always,” said Snape.

To know true love, even though it was impossible to keep, had finally cracked her heart open enough to let someone else in.

Three years later and I’m still writing about you. I don’t know if that says more about you or I.

I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk down that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for either of yours. I perhaps that when you told me you did not love me my feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that. It is unfair to tell you this, I know, when you can do nothing about it.

Let her remain where she is. A constellation away.

I desperately wanted to say Please Don’t Waste Your Time on Me because I feared that I would somehow be the cause of his undoing if I allowed him to fawn over me in the ways that his heart desired. He was, after all, Enlightened and I was a Caster. There was no possibility of his interest in me ever becoming anything more than a romantic fable…

I won’t telephone him. I’ll never telephone him again as long as I live. He’ll rot in hell, before I’ll call him up. You don’t have to give me strength, God; I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I’m waiting here. He’s so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.

Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton’s stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.

All I knew was that I hated her. For I was like any dull ass who has ever loved someone who loved another. I thought: if only she were gone, it would change everything.

‘Twere all one, that I should love a bright particular star. And think to wed it, he is so above me. In his bright radiance and collateral light. Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.

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.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

Although he doesn’t know it yet, she isn’t his real life. But he is hers. This is painful.

Winter is much like unrequited love; cold and merciless.

Do you know what it’s like to like someone so much you can’t stand it and know that they’ll never feel the same way?

I could no longer deny the truth. I was not invisible to him. I was contemptible… Perhaps I deserved it. Surely I didn’t deserve to be loved, for, otherwise, wouldn’t I have found someone to love me by now?

When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, “What was it that you wanted and why didn’t you fight for it?

When you truly love someone, you don’t hurt or cause them pain, that’s how I painfully realized you didn’t love me.

Two Cures for Love 1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter. 2. The easy way: get to know him better.

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.

We were talking nonsense, and I said something silly about unrequited love, and he became very serious, and he stopped me, and he said that unrequited love was not possible; that it was not love. He said that love must be freely given, and freely taken, such that the lovers, in joining, make equal halves of something whole.

Loving someone you can’t be with…it’s a terrible, terrible burden.

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.

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

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.

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.

I fell for you and I fell hard. You bruised my knees and my heart to the point where I will do everything in my power never to fall for anyone again. It’s safer to stay on your feet. I would rather walk through life completely without love – empty; than crawl through what’s been pumping through my veins one more time.

Sometimes life sends us people who don’t love us enough, to remind us of what we’re worthy of.

I wish I had the guts to walk away from what we had. But I can’t because I know you won’t come after me, and that’s what hurts the most.

One sided-love always goes with the urge of possessing.

Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?

I was in love with unavailable man, an old, sad story. When I first started to fall for him, months before, my feelings gave me pleasure and hope. I would wait for him, as lovers had waited for each other since the beginning of time. But as the months passed and he didn’t come around, something inside me shifted. My unrequited love became obsessive.

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!

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.

…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.

Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.

It’s bad enough to love someone who don’t love you, but to have them told of it is perfectly awful. It makes me wild just to think of it. Ah, Fan, I’m getting so ill tempered and envious and wicked, I don’t know what will happen to me.

If you don’t receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.

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.

‘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.’

There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.

…as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.

The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.

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

I love you. I hate you. I like you. I hate you. I love you. I think you’re stupid. I think you’re a loser. I think you’re wonderful. I want to be with you. I don’t want to be with you. I would never date you. I hate you. I love you…..I think the madness started the moment we met and you shook my hand. Did you have a disease or something?

Sometimes you grow to love the shadow that follows.

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.

Unrequited love is the infinite curse of a lonely heart.

The scariest thing about distance is you don’t know if they’ll miss you or forget about you.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

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

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

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.

If I could have had him, I could have let him go. But without the having there was nothing— so to the nothing I hold.

As soon as forever is through, I’ll be over you.

Ask me why I keep on loving you when it’s clear that you don’t feel the same way for me. The problem is that as much as I can’t force you to love me, I can’t force myself to stop loving you.

There’s nothing quite so humbling as thinking you’re completely over someone, then realizing you’re not even close.

Only time can heal your broken heart, just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.

Why hide your feelings to the one you love? Why love the one who loves another? Why give everything if only pain comes in return? Why wait if there’s nothing to wait for? I guess the answer is love.

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

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.

I know this sounds crazy to say after one encounter but I kind of fell for you pretty hard and it has been forever since I’ve connected to anyone like this and my heart is kind of broken in a million pieces.

The sun’s gone dim, and The moon’s turned black; For I loved him, and He didn’t love back.

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?

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.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn’t love you.

There’s something funny about unrequited love — I suppose it’s because we can all identify with it.

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

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

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 opposite. 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.

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

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.”

People do incredible things for love, particularly for unrequited love.

Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?’ ‘Always,’ Carol said, smiling, too.

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.

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

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.”

…Declarations of love amuse me. Especially when unrequited. “— Cassandra Clare

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.

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.

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.

Because by immortalizing the pain of my unrequited love I am letting you go. This is me moving on the only way I know how.

‘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.’

Soul connections are not often found and are worth every bit of fight left in you to keep.

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.

Never fall in love with someone that won’t fight for you because when the real battles begin, they won’t pull your heart to safety, but they will their own.

I loved you even when you forgot me. And—for a little while—you loved me back.

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

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

The saddest thing in the world is loving someone who used to love you.

I never knew until that moment how bad it could hurt to lose something you never really had.

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

‘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.’

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.

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 unrequited 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…

Certainly no one has ever died of an unrequited passion—it’s usually the ones that are requited that get people in trouble.

In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine, connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least – for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women – my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

The pain would not leave him. It came to him like the tide that hits the sea.

You are the best worst thing to ever happen to me.

Some say that one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner.

You know you’ve got it bad when you miss something you never had. At least even for a little while, I was the reason behind your smile.

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Thus, I’m insane because of you, I just can’t stop hoping.

Those eyes that have been my sun, it pains to see them shining for another.

‘If only, if only,’ that’s been my anthem since I set eyes on you.

You have so much power over me to make me happy or sad. Yet the only thing you’ve ever done has been the latter by saying no.

It’s amazing how you could just accomplish so many things by doing nothing. That’s what you do to me when you make me smile just by smiling.

Was I wrong for ever-loving you? Because that’s how I’ve been feeling ever since I first saw you.

The saddest thing about love is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

There is no disguise that can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.

Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest: Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers: Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest, And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!

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.

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not, then marriages would be truly made in heaven.

Loving can cost a lot, but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.

You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.

I hate the day, because it lendeth light To see all things, but not my love to see.

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her, it all comes to nothing.

Most of you have been where I am tonight. The crash site of unrequited love. You ask yourself, How did I get here? What was it about? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrists? What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That’s an age-old question. It’s perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer’s night.

If we must part forever, Give me but one kind word to think upon, And please myself with, while my heart’s breaking.

I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Love leads people to become lost in their own feelings and ignore the world, so it’s no surprise their love for the world goes unrequited.

Unrequited love is the only possible way to give yourself to another without being held in indentured servitude.

Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free; Love me no more, but love my love of thee.

He could remember all about it now: the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.

Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.

You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.

It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

. . . a final comfort that is small, but not cold: The heart is the only broken instrument that works.

One is never too old to yearn.

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!

If someone doesn’t fight to keep you, never fight yourself to stay.

If you want me falling for you, then you have to give me something worth tripping over.

I’m not saying that I think of you constantly, but I can’t deny the fact that each time my mind wanders, it always finds some way back to you.

It hurts when you have someone in your heart but you can’t have them in your arms.

It’s funny how a person can break your heart, and you can still love them with all the little pieces.

It’s hard to wait around for something that you know might never happen. But it’s even harder to give up when you know it’s everything you want.

I’m tired of loving you and hoping you’ll do the same.

I cannot fathom congratulating you on finding love when I’m not the giver of that love.

I find myself wishing every time, if only you knew you are the reason.

My life has been a continuum of unanswered prayers and you bear the largest portion of that.

If only life was fair, but I understand it’s not, that’s why you cannot love me.

I’m happy for you, while feeling unhappy that I’m not the author of your happiness.

Would it be inhumane to wish you sadness, that I may bring me happiness?

I love you, and it kills me each day to see that you do not feel the same way too.

You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can survive in a way that once-requited love cannot.

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.

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

Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.

Among my stillness was a pounding heart.

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.

When the person you love can’t see your love for them beneath the painful things you say when they reject you, remember this: Love is blind.

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.

Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.

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

…I’m the last person to ask about unrequited love – I’ve run away to the Moon and fled to its valleys…

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.

Perhaps unrequited love was a specter in the house, a presence that brushed at the edge of senses, a heat in the dark, and a shadow under the sun”.

Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.

I can’t give you the moon,” the tinker said. “She doesn’t belong to me. She belongs only to herself.

He endured the curse of every man. He had suffered the inevitability of unrequited love.

Every broken heart has screamed at one time or another: Why can’t you see who I truly am?

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.

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.

Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.

But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again, Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys.

Unrequited love is all right in books and things, but in real life, it completely sucks.

In the garden, the Captain of the Guard stared up at the young woman’s balcony, watching as she waltzed alone, lost in her dreams. But he knew her thoughts weren’t of him.

She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?

My heart is sair-I dare na tell, My heart is sair for Somebody.

The priest’s lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal’s doom. My grandmother’s lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.

Think of you! I do not think of you; you are always before my soul.

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

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 its dry reptilian eye on you.

Therefore, have done with this nonsense: you have no ground for hope: dismiss, at once, these hurtful thoughts and foolish wishes from your mind, and turn to your own duty, and the dull blank life that lies before you. You might have known such happiness was not for you.

Granted I’d waited a long time to hear those words. Would’ve sold a kidney, maybe two, to have heard them at one point. Now though…they didn’t have the same impact. They were in fact an overcooked noodle in the pasta salad of love.

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.

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!

You and I Again and again Always almost Never enough. – A world of almosts

He’s charmed by her as if she were some fairy!” continued Arabella. “See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don’t care for him quite so much as he does for her. She’s not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much– as much as she’s able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try–which he’s too simple to do.

How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something.

I did not know how long it took to get over such a love, and that even when you did, when you loved again, you would always carry a sliver of it in your stitched-together heart.

I know that’s what people say– you’ll get over it. I’d say it, too. But I know it’s not true. Oh, you’ll be happy again, never fear. But you won’t forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.

Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.

‘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.’

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…

There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: Up to here, there was no love; from here on, there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take a moment, a month, or a year to come on, and in each two, its gradations are different. With some, it comes fast, with some, it comes slowly. Sometimes one kindles from the other, sometimes, both kindle spontaneously. And once in a tragic while one kindles only after the other has already dimmed and gone out, and has to burn forlornly alone.

It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever

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.

But it wasn’t enough. Whatever I did, I could not rid my mind of the thought that he didn’t love me. I had no doubt that he liked me and meant me well. But this wasn’t anything even close to love. So harrowing was this thought that it was eating me up inside, gnawing at my body and soul.

Someone asked me, ‘Who hurt you so badly?’ I replied, my own expectations.

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.

Isn’t that how falling in love so often works? Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe.

In my dreams, I felt complete and utter love, only to wake up with sadness and loneliness.

I like to think that someday you’ll love me as much as I love you. I believe in destiny.

Loving someone who doesn’t love you back is like hugging a cactus. The tighter you hold on, the more it hurts.

One-sided love is an incomplete symphony, a melody with a missing harmony.

Out of her favor, where I am in love.

She’ll not be hit. With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dian’s wit, And, in strong proof of chastity well armed, From love’s weak childish bow she lives uncharmed

This love I feel, I feel no love in this.

I pray thee chide not. Her I love now. Doth grace for grace and love for love allow. The other did not so.

By giving liberty into thine eyes, examine other beauties.

Come, he hath hid himself among these trees to be consorted (associate with) with the humorous night, blind is his love, and best befits the dark.

That late thou gavest me, for Mercutio’s soul is but a little way above our heads, staying for thine to keep him company, either thou (tybalt) or I, or both, must go with him.

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.

Out of her favour, where I am in love.

Love is like a mirror that reflects your bad side. Especially when it’s unrequited, you get envious, jealous, prejudiced, and resentful. You have to face all sorts of emotions, but there’s no reason to find that shameful.

Someday my memories will fade…And her voice, her actions, I might forget them as well. But I will always remember that I loved Saber.

I won’t hate that person. Even if my love does not reach him. Because they’re still my precious feelings.

There is only one person who you can each truly love. It’s too bad that you can’t change who that person is. If you could, then you both would be a lot happier.

The scariest and the most painful thing is to be hated by someone you truly love.

I’d been wondering whether there is a meaning to a failed love. Is something that disappeared the same as something that never existed? But now I know there is. There was a meaning right here. Because despite the heartbreak, I’m still glad that I fell in love with you.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails…

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I deserve and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.

And it came to pass that the Lord said unto me: If they have not charity it mattereth not unto thee, thou hast been faithful; wherefore, thy garments shall be made clean. And because thou hast seen thy weakness thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father.

Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see

Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle

Gatsby looked at Daisy in a way that every girl wanted to be looked at.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

And then there is another kind of love, the cruelest kind. The one that almost kills its victims. It’s called ‘Unrequited Love’. Of that, I am an expert. Most love stories about people who fall in love with each other. But what about the rest of us? What about our stories? Those of us who fall in love alone. We are the victims of the one-sided affairs. We are the cursed of the loved ones; we are ‘un-loved’ ones. The walking wounded. The handicap without the advancement of a great parking spot. Yes, you are looking at one such individual.

And I have willingly loved that man, for over three miserable years. The absolute worst years of my life! The worst Christmases the worst birthdays! New Year’s Eve brought in by tears and Valium. These years that I’ve been in love have been the darkest days of my life! All because I’ve been cursed by being in love with a man who does not, and will not, love me back. Oh God, Just the sight of him; heart pounding, throat thickening, absolutely can’t swallow. All the usual symptoms.

I understand feeling as small and as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn’t know you had inside you. And it doesn’t matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of chardonnay you drink with your girlfriends… you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy.

If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting. The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Your lord does know my mind, I cannot love him.

Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!

What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

Everything tells me you care for me. And yet never a sign from you.

You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I’ve lived and loved by your light alone. In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.

Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.

…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you. Some people might find that strange. But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.

There is an ocean of silence between us… and I am drowning in it.

If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard. And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.

If you’re searching for a quote that puts your feelings into words – you won’t find it. You can learn every language and read every word ever written – but you’ll never find what’s in your heart. How can you? He has it.

I still think of you every day. But I’m trying not to let it hurt me with the same intensity that it used to.

When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief…. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance ….. What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.

It’s painful, loving someone from afar. Watching them – from the outside. The once familiar elements of their life reduced to nothing more than occasional mentions in conversations and faces changing in photographs….. They exist to you now as nothing more than living proof that something can still hurt you … with no contact at all.

I had someone once who made every day mean something. And now…. I am lost…. And nothing means anything anymore.

He was both everything I could ever want… And nothing I could ever have…

I miss that feeling of connection. Knowing he was out there somewhere thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about him.

Though these words will never find you, I hope that you knew I was thinking of you today….. and that I was wishing you every happiness. Love Always, The girl you loved once.

It’s difficult for me to imagine the rest of my life without you. But I suppose I don’t have to imagine it… I just have to live it.

The last time I felt alive – I was looking into your eyes. Breathing your air…. touching your skin… … Saying goodbye…. The last time I felt alive…. I was dying.

I raised you so high that every other man on earth is now doomed to live in your shadow.

It’s times like this…. when it’s over a year later and I’m still crying over you that I want to turn to you and say: See…. This is why I asked you never to kiss me.

I try to do something positive – I socialize more… But deep down I know the truth. An entire world of people can never replace the one that I’ve lost.

He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.

They say “Follow your heart”…. …. But I can’t follow you where you’re going…

I write what I love. I will not stop – even when my hand hurts…. …. because I cannot stop – even though my heart hurts….

I would have followed you to hell and back… if only you’d lead me back.

The only place I ever felt at home was with you. There isn’t a place for me anywhere anymore… I’ve been evicted.