You grew up reading them – some of them you read because you had to and others – because you wanted to. Yet, every romantic novel on the quote list below is well-known, loved, and truly timeless.
They teach us of love, life, the flusters of the heart, the pain when it’s broken and the true meaning of life well lived.
So, today I give you a special selection of 50 timeless, loved, and pre-loved, re-discovered, and valued love quotes from the classic novels.
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Best Love Quotes From Love Novels
1. “I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
2. “She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable.” Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
3. “Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
4. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
5. “Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.” Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
6. “He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive, and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his, and he said he could not breathe in mine.” Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
7. “She looked extraordinarily beautiful to him and majestic as a phantom; without understanding what she wanted, he had a foreboding of something terrible.” Gustave Flaubert, Madam Bovary
8. “They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees, and the clouds, and the sky over their heads, and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the landscapes drawn up for them to see on their walks, the rooms in which they lived and loved, were even more pleased with their love than they were themselves.” Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
9. “And all the time, she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn’t quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn’t ever love at all.” D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
Quotes on Love From All-Time Best Novels
10. “He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
11.”‘ I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me–for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.'” Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
12. “Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed” Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds
13. “It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.” Edward Morgan Forster, A Room With a View
14. “‘Do you know what friendship is?’ he asked.
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
‘Yes,’ replied the gypsy; ‘it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.’
‘And love?’ pursued Gringoire.
‘Oh! love!’ said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. ‘That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.”
15. “We don’t belong to each other: he’s an independent, and so am I.” Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Iconic Love Quotes From Classic Novels
16. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
17. “Kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good, but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever” Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
18. “Don’t ever think I fell for you or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love; I rose in it.” Toni Morrison, Jazz
19. “Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.” John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
20. “If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.” Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
21. “I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn’t see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.” Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
22. “It will pass, it will all pass, we’re going to be so happy! If our love could grow any stronger, it would grow stronger because there is something horrifying in it” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
23. “Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking out, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love; I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.” Toni Morrison, Jazz
24. “I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.” Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Best Sayings From Classic Novels
25. “The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love In the Time of Cholera
26. “I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!” Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
27. “When you love, you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.” Ernst Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
28. “I hope you find a love like that–one that is all-consuming and powerful that makes you feel like you’re going slightly mad. And if you do find that love, embrace it. Hold onto it. When you give yourself over to love like that, your heart will get bruised. It will get battered. But you will also feel invincible and infinite.” Jill Santopolo, The Light We Lost
29. “Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being, and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.” Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
30. “It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trails, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love In the Time of Cholera
31. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” Jane Austen, Emma
32. “True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.” Love Story, Erich Segal
33. “Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.” Ernst Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
34. “A tear rolled down my cheek. If you died, I realized just then; it would mean that I’d be the keeper of our memories. I’d be the only one on Earth who had experienced them.” Jill Santopolo, The Light We Lost
35. “Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing; but I have never been in love; it is not my way or my nature, and I do not think I ever shall.” Jane Austen, Emma
Heart-Touching Love Quotes From Novels
36. “The Queen’s Pride was his ship, and he loved her. (That was the way his sentences always went: It is raining today, and I love you. My cold is better, and I love you. Say hello to Horse, and I love you. Like that.)” William Goldman, The Princess Bride
37. “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.” Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
38. “Her coming was my hope each day,
Song sung by Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s
Her parting was my pain;
The chance that did her steps delay
Was ice in every vein.”
39. “Seeing him every day was simply a different kind of sorrow from not being able to see him at all.” Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds
40. “It takes someone very special to help you forget someone very special.” Erich Segal, Love Story
41. “You do care a little for me, I know… but nothing to speak of, and you don’t love me. I was yours once till death if you’d cared to keep me, but I’m someone else’s now… and he’s mine in a way that shocks you, but why don’t you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness.” E.M. Forster, Maurice
42. “Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone,
Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One.
I give ye my Spirit, ’til our Life shall be Done.”
43. “Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can’t control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That’s what it was like for me.” Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
Love and Life | Iconic Love Quotes From Novels
44. “some relationships feel like a wildfire-they’re powerful and compelling and majestic and dangerous and have the capability to burn you before you even realize you’ve been consumed…..some relationships feel like a hearth fire-they’re solid and stable and cozy and nourishing.” Jill Santopolo, The Light We Lost
45. “Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
46. “She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both: by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received the benefit of greater importance.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
47. “Nothing around them had changed, and yet, for her, something more momentous had happened than if the mountains had been shoved aside.” Gustave Flaubert, Madam Bovary
48. “Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.” Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
49. “Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world’s enemy, and she must stifle it.” Edward Morgan Forster, A Room With A View
50. “She was darkness, and he was darkness, and there had never been anything before this time, only darkness and his lips upon her. She tried to speak, and his mouth was over hers again. Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast.” Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
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