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." -Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl
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." -George Orwell, 1984
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." -Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain
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." -A.S. Byatt, Possession
5. "By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep; nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her." -Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
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." -Jane Austen, Persuasion
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." -James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
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." -George Eliot, Middlemarch
9. "I love you more than I hate everything else." -Rainbow Rowell, Landline
10. "Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you." -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
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." -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
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." -Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
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." -Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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.’"-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
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?" -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
16. "I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be." -Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
17. "You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought." -Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company
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." -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
19. "I love you more than words can wield the matter, Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty." -William Shakespeare, King Lear
20. "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." -Jane Austen, Emma
21. "For you, a thousand times over." -Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
22. "I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul." -Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
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." -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
24. "You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed." -Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
25. "Her love was entire as a child’s, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring." -Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
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." -D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
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." -Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
28. "When someone loves you it's like having a blanket all round your heart." -Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary
29. "He understood everything she did not say, which at its core was: Don't let go." -Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You
30. "I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand." -Benjamin Alire Saenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
31. "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." -John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
32. "Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved." -Alice Walker, The Color Purple
33. "For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home." -Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss
34. "You could have had anything else in the world, and you asked for me." -Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
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?" -Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
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." -Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent
37. "My own one, I have never loved anyone in the world but you." -Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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." -Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer
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." -Lisa Kleypas, Blue-Eyed Devil
40. "It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight." -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
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." -Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
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." -Ian McEwan, Atonement
43. "Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear." -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
44. "I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me." -Veronica Roth, Allegiant
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." -Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
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?" -George Eliot, Adam Bede
47. "So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you." -Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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." -Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
49. "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." -Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
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." -John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
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." -Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
52. "It is better to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all." -William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
53. "Love sought is good, but given unsought is better." -William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
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." -Hilary T. Smith, Wild Awake
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." -Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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." -Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
57. "Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all." -Toni Morrison, Beloved
58. "You know, when it works, love is pretty amazing. It’s not overrated. There’s a reason for all those songs." -Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby
59. "The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth." -Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
60. "Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel." -Neil Gaiman, Stardust
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." -Toni Morrison, Paradise
62. "Love is a great beautifier." -Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
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." -Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
64. "You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not." -Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
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." -Oprah Winfrey, What I Know for Sure
